Our sustainability

Our journey to zero carbon emissions. 

Reducing Good Energy’s emissions 

Good Energy exists to enable people to fight the climate crisis. But running our business results in carbon emissions of our own. On this page, you can read about how we’re making the way that we work as green as possible.

To see everything else we’re doing to achieve our purpose of powering a cleaner, greener future – from the renewable generators we support to setting up our Good Future Board – read our latest Purpose report.

Read our 2021 Purpose Report
The Good Energy Offices

Tracking our progress 

Read about the different initiatives we’ve introduced to record and reduce our emissions.

2016

EV charge points 

  • Six dual charge points are installed in the Monkton Reach office car park, allowing employees commuting to the office to charge their EVs. We install three more in 2017.

Efficient office lighting 

  • The entire lighting infrastructure across three floors of our office building is updated to LEDs. 

2017

ISO 14001 accreditation 

  • Good Energy is certified as having an Environmental Management System that monitors and works to reduce the company’s environmental impact. This is internally audited every year and externally audited and re-certified every 3 years. Good Energy begins measuring its carbon footprint annually.  

2018

Green Travel Allowance 

  • Employees qualify for this if they travel sustainably to the office, i.e. walking, cycling, using public transport, car sharing or driving an EV. 

Reducing our office space 

  • Good Energy moves from having four to two office buildings, totalling four floors and measuring 2,373m2. 

2019

Online learning: Clean Energy Awareness 

  • All employees complete this training course when they join Good Energy, with modules including renewable generation, smart metering, the Feed-in Tariff, energy efficiency in the home and how we trade our energy. 

2020

Moving to hybrid working 

  • We support all employees to work fully from home during Covid 19, reducing emissions related to commuting. As restrictions ease, we shift to a combination of office and home working.  

Hybrid Working Allowance 

  • Our new allowance supports employees with home office equipment and utility bills. 

Cutting down on paper 

  • We move to a digital-first billing system, reducing paper consumption from 16.9 tonnes in 2019 (equivalent to 16.1 tonnes of CO2 emissions) to 4.1 tonnes in 2021 (3 tonnes of CO2 emissions). 

2021

A smaller, greener office 

  • We reduce our office space to just two floors of one building, measuring 1830m2. 

Measuring home working carbon emissions  

  • Our reduced office occupancy and emissions aren’t a true representation of our company emissions, so we begin measuring the electricity and heating required by employees whilst working at home. 

Relaunching our Green Allowance 

  • Employees can now claim our green allowance if they generate electricity at home, are a Good Energy customer or commute sustainably.

2022

Joining the Science Based Targets Initiative 

  • Our carbon reduction targets are in line with limiting global warming to below 1.5C. As part of our commitment, we start reporting our carbon internally monthly. 

Welcoming our Green Champions 

  • Our new employee working group feeds back on office sustainability initiatives and provides ideas for improvement. 

2030

By the end of the decade, we will achieve our short-term emissions reductions targets under the Science Based Targets Initiative. 

2021 carbon report

Our greenhouse gas emissions for 2021 are shown in the infographic below. 

Key achievements from 2021 include:  

  • Switching to a hybrid working model has decreased commuting emissions by 48.5% compared to 2019.  
  • Moving to a smaller office and switching to a renewable gas tariff has enabled us to reduce our scope 1 emissions to almost 0 tCO2e.  
  • Upgrading our customer billing systems to digital first platforms has reduced emissions from our paper consumption from 16.1 tonnes of carbon emissions to 3 tonnes.  

How are emissions measured?

We have compared our overall emissions and emissions from gas and electricity usage in our office with 2019 rather than 2020. 2020 was a very unusual year in terms of our business operations, and our reporting didn’t fully take into account emissions resulting from home working. Our reporting for 2021 records emissions from home and office-based working, so comparing our emissions against 2019’s figures provides a more realistic view of our progress.   

We follow the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Standard, which is an internationally recognised way of measuring greenhouse gas emissions. These are split into the following scopes: 

  • Scope 1 – Direct emissions, such as gas and refrigerants 
  • Scope 2 – Indirect emissions from electricity usage 
  • Scope 3 – Indirect emissions from activities such as travel and procurement. 

    Full details of our 2021 carbon emissions figures are available on pages 66-67 of our Annual Report.   

Setting Science Based Targets  

More than 2,000 businesses around the world are already voluntarily working with the Science Based Targets initiative – and we’re proud to be one of those organisations.   

Emissions targets are considered ‘science-based’ if they are in-line with what the latest climate science deems necessary to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement – limiting global warming to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C.  

Our chosen target

We’ve committed to a  50% reduction across all scopes by 2030 (from a 2018 base year). We have already reduced our emissions by over 30% by moving to a smaller office space. As we’re now also including homeworking and supply chain emissions in our carbon reporting, we need to find a way to make sure emissions don’t increase again. 

Graph showing our carbon emission reduction performance.
How will we reduce our emissions further? 
  • Continue with our hybrid working model, which results in 20% less emissions than full-time office working.   
  • Review our supply chain and source more net-zero suppliers.  
  • Continue to encourage greener commuting. This is incentivised by our Green Travel Allowance of £250 per year.  
  • Switch to monthly carbon reporting rather than annual, so that we can track our emissions more closely and identify opportunities for improvement faster.   
  • Continue to power our office with renewable energy and look for ways to reduce our energy usage even further.  
How we offset residual emissions

We offset the carbon emissions that we can’t yet avoid by investing in Gold Standard Projects that improve access to green energy around the world.  

In 2021, we offset our workplace emissions by supporting the following project: Biogas Program for the Animal Husbandry Sector in Vietnam. This project works with rural communities in Vietnam to install and maintain biogas generators, which can convert farm waste into renewable biogas, for use as a cooking fuel. The project helps improve health and sanitation, creates jobs and reduces the use of solid fuel such as firewood. 

We support similar green energy projects to offset emissions from the gas supplied to our customers.