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?
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.
1. Biomass: We report renewables as defined by Ofgem (the UK energy regulator), which for better or worse includes biomass. However, we recognise this is contentious. To address this, we show the breakdown of generating technologies for each supplier so users can see the composition. But regardless, your point is valid and has been raised several times this week, so we have a PR open to add a filter that lets viewers exclude biomass if they disagree with the UK's legal definition.
2. Nuclear: Our initial focus was on renewable power (where intermittency is highest), but we'll be adding nuclear to the index in the next few weeks. This will increase the scores for EDF, Octopus Energy, and British Gas in particular, who purchase the majority of nuclear power. We've called this out in various places on the index (e.g., on the EDF page: https://matched.energy/clean-power-index/edf-energy).
3. Load shifting: Because we measure generation and demand at a half-hourly level, we do account for load shifting that suppliers like Octopus incentivise through agile tariffs. This is actually one of the key advantages of our approach over historic annual accounting; the half hourly temporal granularity means we reward load shifting behaviour.
(Or, better, add a toggle to the UI. That will highlight how broken carbon markets and regulatory classifications are.)
The world's forest is renewable. Maybe the rate of harvest is unsustainable. Maybe the forest is not being renewed for other reasons like the land is being used for grazing or development. But it is 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.
What we've tried to do at Matched is make this fact visible, showing which suppliers actually deliver clean power hour by hour rather than just on paper. A number of suppliers (notably Good Energy and Octopus) perform surprisingly well, be procuring renewable power that aligns well with their consumer's demand.
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?
Set the price to be 2x the cost of direct air carbon capture, then put the money in a fund that pays for cheapest environmentally responsible capture first.
This would lead to ev’s and heat pumps being drastically cheaper than older technologies.
While they’re at it, federalize the price gouging oil companies. We have signs at gas stations run by international megacorps here in California complaining that we have the highest fuel taxes in the US. The taxes are listed on the pumps, by law.
If you subtract them out, and compare the results to other states, you’ll find that we’re being price gouged dollars per gallon by the industries.
(The excuse for this is that there was months-long supply chain shock 20+ years ago. Of course, the prices never went down after that shock…)
Anyway, screw them. We have EVs now, and as bad as PG&E’s rates are, it’s still saving us hundreds of dollars a month.
A similar index for Australian power would be pretty useful.
The amount of open data that's available in the UK is laudable and makes our analysis possible. But we do have some theories about how we can expand to other countries. Australia will be an interesting one, given renewable penetration.