September 2020
More Power to Us (Sort of)
An exciting change in how we source our electricity.
In the interests of being as transparent as possible, we like to keep our customers informed on where their energy is coming from. It’s part of why we offer the chance to vote on electricity sources and use the results to inform how we buy and supply energy. With this in mind, we have a very exciting (to us, hopefully to you, too) update - we’ve signed a Power Purchase Agreement!
A Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) is a new way for us to source the energy that powers our customers' homes. Traditionally - like many suppliers - we’ve done this by buying electricity on a wholesale basis through large producers of renewable energy, then working with other partners to help us source Renewable Energy Guarantees of Origin (REGOs) from the generators themselves that prove that the energy we’ve purchased is 100% renewable. For more information on REGOs, see our guide to 100% renewable energy.
Signing a PPA with a generator means that all of the electricity that comes from that site for the next year will go to our customers. While this particular site won’t supply every So Energy customer, it’s a significant step in the right direction.
It’s not too dissimilar to moving from buying your eggs at a supermarket to buying them at a local farm shop, if the farm shop was a hydroelectric power generator and the eggs were electricity. Our local farm shop - for the purposes of this analogy - is Garnett’s Hydro generator on the Wharfe River in Otley, West Yorkshire (the very pretty river you can see at the top of this post). In the three months since we signed our PPA, Garnett’s Mill has used the river’s current to generate 120,000kWh, enough to boil over a million kettles.
We’re thrilled to be making our first steps into sourcing electricity in this way. It gets us closer to the power we procure, it has the potential to support the construction of new renewable generators and these first steps will very much not be our last; we have three more generators coming online in October 2020, and we’re working on partnering with more in the (very) near future so that we know precisely where our electricity is coming from.
If you have any questions or comments about our (very exciting) news or anything else So Energy, please let us know on Facebook, Twitter or at help@so.energy.