GreenPower

If you’re considering switching power suppliers but the effort still feels too large, there might be a “greener” option within your existing provider.

GreenPower is “100% renewable energy available for households and businesses through most energy retailers in Australia.”

That’s how it’s explained on the GreenPower website.

Based on multiple sources though, it works more like this:

• You call your power supplier, and tell them you want your power to come from GreenPower now.
• If it’s something they offer, they’ll agree (after telling you it’s more expensive).
• Next year, once they know your power usage for the year, they’ll go purchase that amount of power from a renewable energy farm (eg a wind farm) on your behalf, and feed it back into the grid. This creates demand for renewables and theoretically grows the sector.
• So you don’t actually get power from a renewable source coming through your powerpoints, it simply gets added into “the grid”. All power for us comes from one grid, so the only way around the grid is to have your own power generation, like solar panels.

So while the GreenPower scheme is great in that it generates business and demand for more renewables, that line from the GreenPower website above is only mildly misleading.