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UK suppliers claim “100% renewable” even when selling fossil power at night.

Newly launched not-for-profit Matched Clean Power Index [1] shows, using open data, each supplier’s true renewable share hour by hour.

Built by a small team of engineers and energy analysts — including a former Tesla engineer — it combines half-hourly data from Elexon (demand), National Grid ESO (generation), and Ofgem (REGOs) to calculate the real renewable fraction for every major UK supplier. It's the first open dataset of its kind [2].

The data exposes a £1 billion-a-year distortion: consumers pay for “green” certificates that don’t align clean supply with demand. Redirecting that could fund storage and flexibility instead.

The best suppliers match 69–88% of their demand with real-time renewables — far better than today’s “100%” claims.

We’d love your thoughts on:

- Next features/datasets: storage, nuclear, or CO₂ intensity?

- API design: what endpoints or update cadence would be useful?

- Visualisation: how would you show renewable matching over time?

[1] https://matched.energy/clean-power-index

[2] https://matched.energy/methodology/v1

The fact they have Drax energy at 88% tells me they are counting the giant coal factory converted to burn the worlds forest as renewable, it definitely is not just because its biomass. They also have EDF energy, the nuclear power producer, very low tells us they are counting Nuclear as a none renewable. They aren't looking at temporal moves of energy either, which is a big part of Octopus energies customers who are solar and battery owners and do a lot of energy shifting for the grid. These three components mean the wrong companies are at the top and bottom. This index is useless as it stands its not about who is good for the environment and not.

The fundamental idea we need, but the implementation here is just terrible they aren't promoting the right things and it makes me wonder who is really behind this given the bad producers who have got themselves to near the top.

6 hours agoby PaulKeeble

As far as I know, this results from allowing a producer to produce 100% fossil fuel energy and buy certificates to "convert" that into 100% renewable.

It's an artifact of stuff like carbon credits. Companies like apple, google, and amazon declare that they are carbon neutral, or will be by some date, and what they actually do is burn a lot of fossil fuel but "offset" it by paying for carbon credits.

7 hours agoby djoldman

These voluntary carbon offset things are only ever going to be a step in roughly the right direction.

It feels wrong somehow to be trying to turn them into a perfect way for committed individuals to opt into paying the full price for their individual contribution to only one aspect of the problem.

Instead we should perhaps take a step back and try to assign the costs of the whole system to everyone, regardless of whether they want to volunteer to pay more to make things happen faster.

It interacts poorly with EV or heat pump adoption where volunteering to pay for the last 5% of green electricity could tip the balance against those purchases. But buying them would lower your carbon footprint at even much lower percentage of clean electricity.

Are green conscious consumers ready for the complexity of paying for 95% clean energy?

5 hours agoby ZeroGravitas

“This is not fraud” - that’s a big claim. There’s no accountability for accuracy, so of course there’s some fraud, waste or abuse.

6 hours agoby dmboyd

HN post is linking to our launch announcement. Full index ranking all major UK suppliers is here: https://matched.energy/clean-power-index

7 hours agoby bensg

I’ve been told that here in Australia our “Green Power” system where well meaning consumers can pay extra for greener power is similarly broken.

A similar index for Australian power would be pretty useful.

7 hours agoby evolve2k