Scottish and Southern Energy

by Merrick Godhaven

Scottish & Southern Energy’s salespeople claim SSE is the greenest electricity company (mind you, they also claimed there are no 100% renewable suppliers and that gas is a renewable power source)(1). At 8.4% renewable(2) they are the best of the big boys, but that’s really not saying much. They’re barely over the minimum threshold for the Renewables Obligation of 6.7% for 2006/07; it’s still over 90% brown power. And worse, SSE are suing the EU for an increase in their carbon emissions allowances(3).

What’s more, the amount of green they have is not due to any principled stand. When Britain’s state-owned electricity was broken up and privatised, SSE happened to buy up a load of dams, around 75% of the UK’s hydro capacity. SSE categorise this as renewable, and despite some new-build including the massive Shetland wind farm and some investment in microgeneration, it’s these old dams that have formed the basis of their claims to being green.

Under the UK government’s Renewables Obligation, electricity suppliers have to buy a set amount of their energy from renewable sources. They get Renewables Obligation Certificates to prove they’ve bought enough. Those who’ve bought too little renewable electricity can buy spare ROCs off suppliers who’ve bought above the threshold or else pay a fine (proceeds of this ‘buy-out’ fund get split among ROC holders).

The scheme was designed to encourage new-build renewables. By imposing a penalty on ‘brown’ energy supply and rewarding the supply of renewables, it should stimulate growth in the latter. But SSE saw the chance to pick up money for nothing.

Initially the government set the Renewables Obligation limit on hydro plants at production of 5 megawatts (4). Most of SSE’s hydro plants are above that level. After some lobbying by the industry, the government upped the threshold to 10MW(5). SSE’s James Martin lobbied the government for an increase to 30MW(6). This had nothing to do with any SSE commitment to renewables; they were just sniffing out free money for running their existing plants.

So, the Renewables Obligation was designed to encourage growth in new-build, yet it was being used to subsidise paid-for, profitable established plants 40 or 50 years old.

It got worse. When the government eventually decided to go no higher than 20MW for the Renewables Obligation, SSE cynically went round seven of their plants and reduced their capacity to under that threshold, cutting it by around 25%(7). In the precise opposite of what the Renewables Obligation was supposed to do, it led to SSE being subsidised for no new-build and a reduction in generation of renewable electricity!

This is what happens when a company exists not to maximise the amount of renewable energy generated but whose stated ‘core objective… is to deliver sustained real growth in the dividend payable to our shareholders’(8).

There are bigger environmental issues with dams. All but the very smallest have a system of dams and tunnels. They gather silt behind the dam wall, blocking the flow of nutrients and wildlife downstream. Over 45,000 hydroelectric dams have been built – averaging more than one a day last century - fragmenting many of the world’s major rivers. They are an environmental catastrophe in wildlife terms, but that’s not the half of it.

Despite what the government and SSE say, hydroelectric dams are not clean, green friends of the climate. The plant life they submerge decays without oxygen, so it gives off methane. For several years after the land is flooded all the immersed vegetation gives off a huge pulse of methane. Even after it subsides, methane production continues as seasonal drops in reservoir levels allow plants to grow which later get submerged. This is serious stuff - methane’s impact on the greenhouse effect is more than 20 times that of CO2.

So, for example, a study of the greenhouse effect emissions from the Curuá-Una dam in Brazil showed that, even more than a decade after filling, it was nearly four times worse than if the same amount of electricity had been generated from burning oil (9).

The effect varies widely from dam to dam; it is much worse in tropical areas where plant growth is more vigorous, and in reservoirs of new dams (where the entire lake floor is decaying plant matter). These factors don’t apply in Scotland. However, studies in temperate areas show that the greenhouse effect contribution is still significant; at best it appears a dam gives one-tenth of the greenhouse effect of generating the same power thermally (10).

The World Commission on Dams – despite being paid by the largest funder of dams the World Bank – said, ‘Greenhouse gases are emitted for decades from all dam reservoirs in the boreal and tropical regions for which measurements have been made. This is in contrast to the widespread assumption that such emissions are zero. There is no justification for claiming that hydroelectricity does not contribute significantly to global warming.’(11)

A spokesperson for SSE said, ‘we know some environmentalists have a problem with dams. But as far as we see it, it’s power from water running down hills. The water would still run down the hills even if there wasn’t a dam there. We think it’s the greenest form of electricity there is.’(12)

With modern environmental standards, large dams simply wouldn’t get planning permission. There are smaller scale, low impact hydro plants. Principled renewable electricity supplier Good Energy buys from several that are essentially glorified water wheels, and as they have no dam reservoir there isn’t the plant-growth methane issue. So, some small hydro can still be considered as genuinely environmentally friendly renewable energy.

But old hydroelectric dams are really not ‘the greenest form of electricity there is’. Saying so is nearly as absurd as SSE’s publicity claim that being on their Power2 green tariff means you can ‘beat global warming just by baking, clean up the environment just by vacuuming’ (13).

A more recent Power2 leaflet offered to plant six trees a year per customer to ‘balance out’ their gas and waste’s carbon emissions. Planting trees as carbon offsets is a complete fraud. The Advertising Standards Authority ruled that SSE’s leaflet claiming it would offset the emissions was unsubstantiated and untruthful (14).

Scottish & Southern Energy also offer a tariff called RSPB Energy, where they donate £10 per customer to the RSPB, and a further £5 a year thereafter. It costs about 5% more than normal electricity (15). Once again they claim to have come up with ‘the greenest electricity product in the UK’ (16). It proudly declares itself to be from environmentally friendly 100% renewable sources, but 90% of it is from methane-intensive large-scale hydro (17). The risible Power2 tariff, incidentally, is 100% large-scale hydro (18).

Instead of signing up to the RSPB tariff, you could stop funding climate criminals and donate your fiver directly (perhaps out of the 5% premium saved). At a paltry 10p a week to the RSPB, you’ve got to wonder whether customers on the tariff are giving more money to SSE’s lawyers suing the EU for greater carbon emission quotas.

Whichever, the climate change caused by SSE’s fossil and dam installations will surely be far worse for birdlife than any redress £5 a year can buy.