Integral Energy's Enviro-tokenism

I got an offer in the mail the other day - Integral Energy want me to switch my business to them. The gimmick is that instead of offering me lower rates as an incentive, I will be helping the environment by signing with them: they want to put me on their "InGreen Home" program.

The headline on their offer is "Feel good about the future - at no extra cost". Note the emphasis on feeling like you're doing your bit, without any suggestion that switching will make any difference to the environment.

The opening paragraphs read "You've probably heard a lot about global warming in the media. The drought, floods and warmer winters are a major concern for the future of our environment.

"As one of the largest energy retailers in NSW, Integral Energy is always looking for ways to help its customers protect the environment and feel good about the future [my emphasis]. That's why we're excited to offer you INgreen Home - an innovative, 100% renewable energy solution (Ingreen Home is 10% accredited Green Power and 90% non-accredited energy from 100% renewable sources.) This utilises energy sourced from nature. And you'll pay no more than the regulated tariff which applies in your area."

What the fuck is "energy sourced from nature"? More to the point, what energy isn't sourced from nature? Translated, Integral Energy seems to be bragging, "We promise that we will not break the first law of thermodynamics!"

I looked on their website for their environmental credentials. Their brag page about reducing greenhouse gas emissions is titled "Compliance and Beyond". Which tells you something straight away. They "continue to meet" their mandatory targets. Here's the "beyond" part: "Integral Energy was one of the first energy service corporations to join the then Greenhouse Challenge program, signing on in September 1996. Under this voluntary agreement, Integral Energy has committed to developing and implementing a number of actions designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Progress on actions are reported annually to the Department of Environment and Heritage." Well, they've committed themselves, how impressive.

So if I join this program, am I helping them to do anything other than meet their mandatory targets? It seems as if the "equivalent amount of your total electricity" that they commit to purchasing from renewable sources, in all probability, just means that they mark you down for what they have to purchase anyway. There is nothing at all to suggest that they will purchase additional renewable energy if I sign with them. Once they have enough people signed up to the INGreen program to represent their mandatory requirements, do they stop offering it? I suppose I could investigate further, but I think I know when I'm being sold a bill of goods. What a crock. Still, as long as all those customers are feeling good about the future, at no extra cost...

We Are In Trouble, and fucking tokenism is not helping.

ADDED: Well, I decided I should do it properly. They have an enquiry form on their website - I sent them the following enquiry. If I get a response, I'll post it:

I received your offer to switch to the INGreen program, but have two additional questions:

1) You state that this program "utilises energy sourced from nature". Where, other than nature, can energy be sourced?

2) I see from your website that you are already required to purchase a mandatory amount of renewable energy. If I sign with this program, will you purchase additional renewable energy to the extent of my usage, or will my usage simply be covered by your mandatory requirements?

I write a blog at www.nicholascarvan.com/blog and have posted my concerns with this program. If you can answer these questions, I will post your reply.

UPDATE: Here is Integral's rather predictable response.

Dear Nicholas,

Thank you for email.

Please find attached link to our web site which will answer your questions regarding renewable energy.

Link

Regards
Doris
Customer Service Representative
Integral Energy

No Doris, it answers neither of my questions. Yet, in not answering them, answers them rather well.

THIRD AND FINAL UPDATE, FOR TIM

OK, Tim has linked to me, so I decided to really, really do it properly and answer what Doris couldn't. The serious question, anyway, as I'm pretty sure Integral haven't worked out a way around the first law of thermodynamics.

Tim says that he switched to an environment friendly plan with Energy Australia a while back, and wants to know if he's been conned. It seems he hasn't. On Doris's webpage, there is a footnote: "Green Power is renewable energy that is independently audited and verified by the National Green Power Accreditation Steering Group."

So I googled the National Green Power Accreditation Steering Group, and found their website. Unlike Integral's, it has hard facts and copious documentation to get stuck into, although some of it has to be dug out of PDF quarterly reports.

Now, remember that the plan offered by Integral uses 10% Green Power accredited energy, and 90% non-accredited power from allegedly environmentally friendly renewable resources. Here is what the website says about non-accredited renewable energy products:

There are currently no regulatory guidelines or accreditation framework governing non-Accredited Renewable Energy products, or NAREs, and therefore there is no guarantee regarding the sources of generation [my emphasis] or that sales of NAREs are driving investment in ‘new’ renewable energy projects.

More importantly, here is the answer to my question to Doris: "Accredited Green Power purchases are additional to any other requirements on electricity retailers to purchase renewable energy.". However, please remember that this only applies to accredited energy - there is still no way of knowing how Integral use the numbers on the other 90%.

The real fun, though, starts with the quarterly reports, where one can get into the details of the programs offered by the various companies. And Integral's performance is pretty dismal. They offer two products, both recently introduced: the dodgy 10% gimmick one I was offered, and another, called INGreen Pure, which uses 100% accredited energy. How serious are they about the second? "INGreen Pure was launched during the quarter ending March 2006... this is the first quarter that this product has been reported and therefore there is no trend available."

And how did this program do in its first quarter? This bit is so brilliant, and so vindicating, that I'm going to break all my design rules for this blog and utilise bold caps for the kicker:

"AT THE END OF JUNE 2006 THERE WAS ONE REGULAR CUSTOMER"!

Who was it? Was it Doris? I'd like to meet this one trailblazer and shake their hand. Whoever they were, they use a lot of energy, burning through an impressive 3MWh all by themselves. Congratulations are definately in order here for the one hard-partying but environmentally concious person who took up this program. Good show.

Now to Tim's program. Energy Australia offers a choice of 50% or 100% accredited renewable energy on their program. So Tim, you can feel confident that you haven't been conned, and the energy you use would not otherwise be bought from accredited renewable sources. To the end of the June quarter, accredited renewable energy purchased on this program by Energy Australia was 139,888MWh. Total purchased on Integral Energy's piss-weak 10% program, on the other hand, was, 49MWh.

Now, admittedly, this doesn't include the 3MWh purchased by the intrepid trailblazer. And Energy Australia services a much larger area, but the numbers speak for themselves, don't they? In fact, they're so jaw-dropping that you might think I've made them up, in which case I urge you to check them for yourselves on the quarterly report pdf.

CONCLUSIONS:

1. My bullshit detector was right on the money.

2. Integral Energy's program is a con; Energy Australia's isn't.

3. I should look into switching myself to Energy Australia's 100% program, if I can afford it, or 50% one, if I can't, and so should you. I am, in fact, already with Energy Australia - I suspect Integral's entire cynical approach is to use a green come-on to get more business.

4. For some reason, I feel really positive for having done this, instead of having thrown a piece of junk mail that annoyed me straight in the bin. It seems so obvious that this problem is a huge one, which will affect all of us, and all of our kids - yet we are up against so much. I know it's important, but my natural cynicism tends to stop me from doing anything other than sniping at efforts that seem pointless. Which is not necessarily invalid, but also doesn't help much. And I love the internet - this great amorphous resource which is surely one of the best things we have at our disposal - I love it that I can write this page, and know that it will be in Google, and that people who are interested in these topics will read it, and perhaps make different decisions because of it.

5. I'm tired, and have worked hard enough - time to don the cape, assume my more-fun alter-ego, and go play with dominos.

posted by Nicholas @ 7:02 PM 16 comments

Guest post

I grow impatient, waiting for my 1,094 dominos to arrive.

posted by Megawati Man @ 4:22 PM 11 comments

Plup hits the small screen

The ABC were in the good ship Plup yesterday afternoon to film a segment for their new monthly book club show, The First Tuesday Book Club. I missed the first episode of the show, but apparently it was notable for their guest reader, that old gardening codger with the strange accent, going postal about Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho and suggesting it should be composted. Anyway, they were in Plup filming for the second episode; specifically, they were shooting brief dramatic excerpts from Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind.

They had appealed to my sense of cultural obligation to allow them to film, but I was having none of that, and held out for eighty bucks, after telling a few whoppers about what we would lose in trade while they filmed. I was quite pleased with myself, until I found out that the Famous Mr G from over the road got a hundred out of them earlier in the day. But he is, of course, more famous than I. Anyway, the whole thing was thoroughly enjoyable for me and Helen. There was the producer/director, a cranky camerman, a redundant sound guy, a charming Old World gent named Pedro (who played the father), and in the starring role, an obnoxious and callow young punk who lived up to Helen's and my expectations for the sort of precocity and arrogance we wanted to see in a "child actor" (he was more like fifteen).

Our rather smallish bookstore was to represent (perhaps, I'd guess, intermixed with footage from the Famous Mr G's place) "The Cemetary of Forgotten Books", which is described in the novel in typically overwrought prose (I figured I should read it - I'm about half-way through it, and am not a fan) thusly:

A blue-tinted gloom obscured the sinuous contours of a marble staircase and a gallery of frescoes peopled with angels and fabulous creatures. We followed our host through a palatial corridor and arrived at a sprawling round hall, a spiralling basilica of shadows that was pierced by shafts of light from a high glass dome above us. A labyrinth of passageways and crammed bookshelves rose from base to pinnacle like a beehive, woven with tunnels, steps, platforms and bridges that presaged an immense library of seemingly impossible geometry.

Whoa! Those familar with Plup may fail to recognize many similarities. But what we did have, apparently, were shelves at angles, and a circular layout. Armed with a wide-angled lens, the director's vision was simple: they would do a circuit of the store, walking backwards, and voila: Plup would be the Cemetary of Forgotten Books.

The only problem with this was that there are a number of tight squeezes in that little circle, which are hard for a grumpy cameraman to navigate while walking backwards, even when being guided from behind. The squeeze between biography and popular fiction, for instance, is tricky. The callow young punk playing the protagonist, who as Helen said fancied himself a member of the Vines, had a lot of trouble pulling off the emotion of "wonderment". The cranky camerman felt they had the shot. He was tired of bumping into biography. He complained that the camera was heavy. The director, however, had a vision. And damn it, that vision did not include a face-out hardcover of Luke Rhinehart's "Search for The Diceman". This was supposed to be Barcelona in the time of Franco...

Finally they had the shot. It was time for the next setup, in which the callow punk would discover the fabled copy of "Shadow of the Wind", the mysterious book by Julian Carax. Well, Carax is not far, alphabetically speaking, from Carvan, and I had copies of Suburban Aliens positioned in all their anachronicity in every conceivable section - unfortunately the director decided the discovery would take place in the poetry section, where I haven't yet managed to justify putting a cache of my novel. They had a Heron edition of something-or-other dummied up as the fabled volume. I could have told them that Heron editions are anachronistic as well, but who but a bookseller would notice? Actually, spotting anachronistic Heron editions, along with Britannica's Great Books of the Western World and Reader's Digests, in movie sets is a small pastime of mine - they always drag them out for a cheap-ass version of the leather-bound library look. Once again, the callow punk's unique renditioning of "wonderment" was displayed. I predict a big future for this kid. The director tried to motivate him, "What book would you love to discover?" he asked. "Have you got your motivation? Got your Method?" The callow punk scratched at his suit and imagined, I supposed, pulling a fifty of weed and a Penthouse from the shelves. The take was a success.

One more shot; one more fine display of wonderment. The father gestured off down an aisle that doesn't exist, and the callow punk wondered his way across the store and hid behind the shelf of art books. It was in the can. The director gave me my eighty bucks and the troupe departed to find some streets around Newtown that would double for Franco's Barcelona as seamlessly as Plup had doubled for The Cemetary of Forgotten Books.

Later, after I'd left, the director came back with some paper-work. Apparently he had quite a bitch to Helen about the uselessness and obnoxiousness of the callow punk.

Anyway, if you want to see what became of all this, it should be on the ABC on the First Tuesday of September (the 5th). Should be worth watching.

posted by Nicholas @ 7:33 PM 3 comments

99 Luftballons

I thought I should update this, in case you all thought me dead. I am alive, and on holidays, something I get to do a bit less often than twice a year. I'm down at Austinmer, which is where I go to retreat from life. It has been pleasant; I've been reading fat books I've been meaning to read for a while. An evolutionary biology thing by Steven Pinker about nature vs nurture was so annoying that I've gone back a bit towards the nurture side of things: the inevitable strain of facism running through the naturists, combined with some piss-weak posturing and a "you too, but worse!" style of argument really ticked me off. It did give me one good laugh, though; a reproachful account of the greatest low-blow I've ever come across in academia, when one of the nurture guys said of the evolutionary biologists that every evolutionary biology text he read made him feel like he was reading an autobiography of the author's sex-life. You probably need to have read Richard Dawkins to get why that's so funny - for all his interesting ideas, what you bring away from his books is the strong impression that he's a horrid little masturbating weasel.

I can't believe I used the word "naturists" in that paragraph - I probably should have found a simile. I used the word once before on my blog and ever since I've been getting hits by citizens of the world with odd tastes in curiosa. Anyway, while I try to relax, the good ship Plup, hardly the pride of the navy at the best of times, has been floundering along in my absence. Everybody there has been working hard while I watch DVDs, go for walks and sit in the sun, so no complaints on that score, but in retrospect it was probably a bit much to expect people to find books in my apartment. There's about seven thousand books there, and the Carvan Cascading Subject System of filing books is not causing Dewey to lose any sleep. Trying to take a break from an internet business is strange - I can still see the orders coming in, piling up in the inbox, I just can't do much about them. It makes it a little harder to relax, but of late I've gotten a lot better at switching my mind off of work things, although it has taken a concious effort to learn to do so.

Which does free up my mind for creative things, and although the evidence might not be apparent on my blog I have been thinking more creatively. OK, I kind of vegetated over winter, spent too much time watching Big Brother (but hey! I backed Jaimie at 6-1 in the first month, and won $300! And people said my obsession was unhealthy - at least I made it turn a profit!). But I've been thinking about writing, as well, and I actually have an idea for a novel that is something more than a vague conception. I've been plotting it, which is not something I've ever done before - I used to have these romantic ideas about The Journey, and Discovery, but against that, I kept running into plot problems about halfway through. So I'm trying to plot it out first this time - we'll see how that goes. Part One is clear in my head, and thoroughly outlined on paper. Except for the Imaginative Act of Retribution. Haven't figured that out yet, although I'm sure something will come to me.

posted by Nicholas @ 12:52 AM 4 comments