Ethical Energy Suppliers

Find an ethical energy supplier

Energy supply in the UK is a very artificial and complicated market, with a lot of confusion about renewable energy and green tariffs.

In this guide we explore the ethical and environmental issues of energy, green tariffs, greenwashing, green gas, and community energy, and see if there are any ethical energy providers.

Which energy brands are in the guide?

There are 17 energy companies in this guide including the big supplies such as British Gas, EDF, E.ON, Octopus, and Scottish Power. 

We also cover smaller suppliers such as 100Green, Ecotricity, Good Energy, Ovo, Utility Warehouse, Utilita, and Your Co-op Energy.

What makes an energy supplier ethical?

In our view, an ethical energy supplier is one that helps the national grid become less reliant on fossil fuels. This might be through building renewable generation capacity itself, or by purchasing energy directly from renewable generators and community energy projects. Companies can also shape customer demand to take pressure off the national grid, exemplified by Octopus' innovative Agile tariffs.

An ethical energy supplier is also one that doesn’t channel its revenue through tax havens, exploit vulnerable customers, or lavish fortunes on its executives and shareholders during a fuel poverty crisis.

Are green tariffs greenwash?

Our previous work on energy suppliers zoned in on the mis-selling of misleading green tariffs. Simply offering a green tariff is unfortunately no guarantee that a company is taking meaningful action on the environment.

No matter your tariff, the electricity used when you switch on your kettle comes from the national grid, which mixes fossil fuels, renewables, and nuclear sources. All tariffs draw from this same supply, meaning that your electricity has the same carbon footprint regardless of which company you pay.

This matters, because “green” or “100% renewable” marketing can give the false impression that unlimited energy use comes without environmental cost.

Indeed, a Utilita study found that 30% of customers on renewable tariffs felt less guilty about wasting energy.

If you are on a 100% renewable tariff, your supplier should add sufficient renewable energy to the national grid to match what you are taking out. Ideally, this is renewable energy that it has generated itself or has been purchased directly from renewable generators via a power purchase agreement (PPA).

But tariffs can also use a loophole: REGOs (Renewable Energy Guarantee of Origin certificates).

These can be bought separately from actual renewable energy, allowing suppliers to claim their electricity is 100% renewable without directly supporting renewable generation.

REGOs were designed to provide an extra subsidy for renewable developers, but a relatively low demand for green tariffs alongside a relatively high proportion of renewable power on the grid has driven the price down, so the subsidy they currently provide is minimal. It's hard to prove a causal link between REGOs and the renewable transition, so we deem entirely REGO-based renewable tariffs to be misleading.

This is why we don't use companies' own fuel mix reporting as a basis for our ratings – these figures can suggest that a company is taking far more action on renewables than it actually is. We have more on this if you wish to delve deeper into the intricacies of how green tariffs work.

Honest approach from Utilita

Utilita sits in the bottom half of our score table but stands out for its honest approach to green tariffs and its own environmental limitations. 

The company doesn’t claim to supply '100% green' energy, refers to its energy mix as 'brown', and has a refreshingly frank description of the workings of the system on its website.

Energy suppliers moving away from REGOs

Previously we marked companies down for misleading customers with REGO-based tariffs.

A number of companies, including Outfox the Market, OVO, Shell Energy, and So Energy, were claiming all of their tariffs were 100% renewable, but all of their so-called renewable power came from fairly meaningless certificate purchases. We're pleased to say that the tide appears to be turning on this particular form of greenwash.

OVO made a particularly high profile about-face on this issue in April 2023, when it became the first major UK energy supplier to ditch REGOs.

This followed consultations with Ethical Consumer and a range of industry experts. Commendably, the company has invested heavily in power purchase agreements (PPAs) with renewable generators, and can now legitimately claim to offer a greener electricity tariff which is fully PPA-backed.

So Energy too has set up PPAs with a number of windfarms across the country, and states on its website that these provide enough power to cover around 25% of its customers' energy use. Scottish Power also offers a green tariff which is fully backed by its own windfarms, and Your Co-op Energy's “Community Power Tariff” is fully backed by local community generation projects.

Outfox the Market took a different approach and simply stopped claiming to provide renewable energy. Shell Energy meanwhile ceased to exist, and its customers were transferred to Octopus. 

Although we have seen positive turns from some major companies, the UK’s energy system operator still expects the country to fall short of its climate targets over the next decade because it is not increasing its supply of clean electricity quickly enough.
 

How we rated companies for their energy supply

Our new bespoke green energy rating assessed each company’s contribution to renewable energy in the UK.

Companies were rewarded if they: 

• have a high proportion of their supply business with direct renewable energy generation or power purchase agreements (PPAs)
• are building or investing in new renewable generation assets
• are incentivising better consumer use of energy through innovative tariffs.

Good Energy and 100green scored highest as they backed all of their tariffs with meaningful PPAs and were not using REGOs to artificially bolster their green credentials. Ecotricity does use a significant proportion of REGOs – only 25% of its supply is backed by direct generation and PPAs – but its 'bills into mills' approach ensures that customer revenues directly fund new renewable generation sites.

Octopus is the other high scorer for this category. Although it is a major renewable investor, it is also notable for its innovative tariffs. Octopus uses dynamic pricing to shape customer demand, offering cheap prices when there is surplus renewable supply, and surging prices when capacity cannot meet demand. Driving customers towards more flexible grid use is going to be essential for renewable resilience in a country where the wind and sun are often unreliable colleagues.

Which energy companies score worst for climate?

Our climate rating scores among the 17 brands are generally fairly aligned with those for Green Energy Supply. If they did well for one, they did well for the other. 

However, although British Gas scored reasonably well for Green Energy Supply, it lost 50 marks under the Climate rating for greenwashing allegations: firstly for allegedly buying "junk" carbon credits, and secondly for the misleading advertising of renewable tariffs.

Other companies who scored zero for Climate were Tulo Energy and Outfox the Market. Low scorers included Sainsbury's Energy, Utilita, and Utility Warehouse. All the rest scored above 40 (out of 100) for Climate.

Top scorers for Climate were Good Energy and 100Green.

In a positive turn, it appears that all companies in the guide are on track to phase out coal in their operations outside the UK (where coal generation ended in September 2024). Long-time major fossil fuel generators like Iberdrola (Scottish Power), E.ON and ESB (So Energy's ultimate owner) have rapidly grown their renewable portfolios in recent years and are making genuine progress in shutting down their most polluting facilities.

Barriers to renewable energy

There are ideological and corporate barriers to renewable energy but the biggest problem renewable energy faces is arguably infrastructural. The national grid was built for the predictable, plodding output of coal and gas, not the peaks and troughs of wind and solar. As a result, renewable energy is regularly wasted, with wind farms paid to power down when the grid can’t cope. 

Zonal pricing was suggested – and heavily pushed by Octopus – as a possible solution to this, but did not make it through parliament. Zonal pricing is where places generating lots of renewable energy would have cheaper bills. 

Ambitions to scale up renewables are increasingly bumping up against outdated cables, bottlenecks in transmission, and sluggish planning systems. Without serious investment in a smarter, more flexible grid that can store energy and shift it across regions in real time, the UK’s net zero targets risk being little more than well-dressed press releases. 
 

Tariff prices

The UK energy price cap limits how much suppliers can charge for a standard variable tariff, but some brands hold exemptions from the cap and are more expensive. This is because they have proved to Ofgem (the energy regulator), that they have higher costs because they support renewables, that they support renewables beyond existing subsidies, and that customers have actively chosen to buy them. 

For example, for a standard variable electricity rate for Manchester in July 2025:

• Ecotricity: 30.46 pence per kWh
• Octopus: 26.65 pence per kWh 

Most other suppliers set their prices at or very close to the cap, so consumers are unlikely to stumble across any genuinely great deals.

In some sectors that we cover, like clothing, choosing the cheapest option like fast fashion brands carries a significant ethical cost, for example by supporting forced labour. The stakes are lower when it comes to choosing an energy supplier. 

The national grid is a major limiting factor when it comes to the renewable transition, so suppliers themselves have limited room for ethical manoeuvrer. 

Paying extra for a tariff that supports more renewable generation is certainly a good thing but only select a more expensive tariff if you can afford it.

Octopus’s Agile tariff is certainly worth a look however. This is a dynamic electricity tariff where half-hourly unit rates directly reflect UK wholesale power prices, with daily prices for the next 24 hours published in the evening so you can plan usage during cheaper periods or avoid peak times.

Prices can even turn negative at times of surplus renewable generation and low nationwide demand, meaning that Octopus will actually pay customers to use their electricity. Costs do also surge in line with supply and demand however, so ensure that you are able to shift your energy use away from expensive peaks if you want to make significant savings overall.

UK energy fuel mix

The UK remains committed to reaching net zero by 2050, yet the percentage of renewable energy in the national grid has remained fairly static over the last few years.

The UK’s overall fuel mix is currently:

• renewables 42.1%
• natural gas 33.3%
• nuclear 16.2%
• coal 5.9%
• other 2.5%

What is green gas?

This guide is primarily concerned with electricity supply, as this is the main point of differentiation between the companies (e.g. their commitment to renewable energy). Most suppliers simply sell gas from the national grid and are not actively working to decarbonise this part of their business.

100green, Ecotricity, and Good Energy are outliers in this respect, as each claims to provide green gas to their customers. But these claims are more complex than they initially appear.

100green uses gas produced via a process called anaerobic digestion. Bacteria break down organic waste such as animal manure, wastewater biosolids, and food waste, and this produces enough gas to cover 100% of its customer base.

Good Energy also uses this form of biogas, but only enough to cover 10% of its total supply – the remaining 90% is offset natural gas. Importantly though, this process relies on byproducts from the farming sector, like silage and manure, so cannot be said to be vegan. Indeed, one of 100green’s generators is a dairy farm.

Where does the UK's natural gas come from?

The severity of the UK’s energy crisis and resultant demands for ‘energy independence’ might have suggested that the country was directly dependent on gas and oil from Russia, yet this is not the case.

The UK certainly uses a substantial amount of natural gas. However, around 30% of this gas is produced in the UK in the North Sea, while the rest is largely imported from Norway and the USA. Only 3% of the UK’s gas was imported from Russia in 2021, and this was stopped in 2022.

The reason that prices are affected by what Russia does is that prices are tied together in a global market. The notion that increased gas production in the UK would relieve prices is therefore highly misleading. UK-produced gas will not stay in the UK if gas producers can secure a higher price elsewhere. Energy independence is a symbolic, not a pragmatic, political goal.

The UK also exports some of its natural gas.

Recent changes in the UK energy market

Octopus Energy has truly wrapped its tentacles around the UK, becoming the UK’s largest retail supplier in January 2025. To have eclipsed the traditional big five companies in under a decade of trading is undoubtedly impressive.

Octopus has cemented its dominance not only in customer numbers but also as the major players’ innovator-in-chief, spearheading controversial zonal pricing advocacy and investing heavily in new renewables.

On the smaller end of the scale, previous Best Buy company Good Energy has been bought by the Dubai-headquartered Esyasoft, owned by the somewhat vaguely named International Holding Company (IHC). This is a group of companies which is chaired by Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al-Nahyan, part of the Gulf state’s ruling family – he is the brother of UAE’s current president and the son of the country’s founder.

This takeover brought Good Energy’s score down significantly, as its new owner scored 0/100 under both Tax Conduct and Company Ethos. Good Energy itself continues to proactively promote renewable power, and is recognised by Ofgem, the energy regulator, for its renewable contribution.

Previous Best Buy company Ripple has unfortunately gone into administration, but that’s not all bad news, as we explain later.

The UK energy market

Ethical Consumer's last guide to energy suppliers came out in the winter of 2022/23, amidst chaos and upheaval in the energy sector. Energy prices were still reeling from the war in Ukraine, the energy price cap stood at £2500 per typical household, suppliers were being accused of breaking into the homes of vulnerable customers to install prepayment meters, and Don’t Pay UK’s “energy strike” campaign dominated headlines as the fuel poverty crisis deepened.

Looking back from our 2025 vantage point, it's hard to tell whether the situation has improved or if we've just normalised living in a perpetual energy crisis. The price cap came down to £1,720 in July 2025, but is widely predicted to remain above pre-crisis levels for the remainder of the decade.

Elsewhere, good news is scarce. Growing geopolitical instability risks governments prioritising defence budgets over renewable generation targets, the US government has banned offshore wind development in favour of "drill, baby, drill", and blackouts in Spain have sparked a culture war over renewables.

The UK has at long last waved goodbye to coal generation, with the last plant closing in September 2024. The country remains heavily reliant on natural gas however, and, while gas may burn more cleanly than coal, it is arguably little better once emissions from drilling, cooling and shipping are factored in.

Excess profit in the energy market

While many people have spent the last few winters wrapping up warm to save switching on the heating, energy companies have basked in the rosy glow of record profits. We talk about an energy crisis, but for some it’s a boom time.

According to the End Fuel Poverty Coalition profit tracker, 20 global energy companies made a total of £514bn profit since 2020. 

Campaign group Warm This Winter calculated that this sum could pay Centrica boss Chris O’Shea for 58,902 years on his then salary of £8.2m. O’Shea spoke to BBC Breakfast earlier this year about his pay, frankly admitting: “You cannot justify a salary of that size.”

Centrica (which owns British Gas) is not alone in awarding unjustifiable fortunes to its executives.

Eight companies lost marks for paying over £1m to their director in the last year, or for not disclosing this figure. Companies with excessive pay at the top were: 

• E.ON
• EDF
• Iberdrola (Scottish Power)
• International Holding Company (Good Energy's owner)
• Octopus
• OVO
• Sainsbury's
• Utilita

Any of these executives would have a hard time justifying their income to the people at the sharp end of the energy crisis.

If you're shivering in your thermals this winter, spare a thought for the energy companies – those profits and bonuses have to freeze sometime, haven't they?

Profits made by energy network providers

Citizens Advice reported earlier this year that the total energy debt that households owe to suppliers has reached a record £3.8bn. 

Conversely, the profits pocketed by energy network providers during the energy crisis over the last four years is £3.9bn. 

Energy network providers are the companies that manage the infrastructure – they are responsible for the wires, cables and pipes that carry electricity and gas to your home, such as Electricity North West, UK Power Networks, and National Grid. These companies hold regional monopolies over the energy network and their charges are added to our bills. We rely on government regulator Ofgem to set fair network charges. It didn’t.

Citizens Advice said that instead of getting customers a fair deal, Ofgem effectively rewarded companies with billions in profits. Citizens Advice said,

With average bills now over two-thirds higher than they were in 2021, ... [we want] network companies to use the money to support those struggling with rising costs, through targeted energy bill support and debt write-off schemes.

Lobbying by energy firms

The research for this guide revealed lobbying activity by some energy providers.

E.ON, Iberdrola (Scottish Power) and Centrica (British Gas) lost points for Company Ethos because of their memberships of lobbying groups.

Energy companies and their representatives also actively lobby the UK and Scottish Parliaments.

According to Transparency International UK, the top 10 energy lobbyists between the 2024 General Election and 1 April 2025 included public relations firm Message Matters (clients include EDF, Equinor, Scottish Renewables) with 36 meetings with ministers and MPs, alongside retailers Centrica (21), Scottish Power (19) and Octopus Energy (14). Trade association Energy UK attended 17 meetings in Westminster.

We'd like to be able to report on the details of these engagements but, as demonstrated by a new report from InfluenceGap, the UK has major transparency gaps in lobbying disclosures compared to other democracies. There is no comprehensive lobbying register, and many meetings and policy consultation responses are not published, making it difficult to track the true extent of lobbying activities across all sectors.

If the UK Government has shown a tepid response to fuel poverty and the energy sector’s massive profits, perhaps it’s because the lobbyists are stealing the limelight.

Energy companies and their tax conduct

Energy suppliers have made great profits from consumers during the energy crisis, but how keen were they to bolster the public purse through tax? 

Six companies in our guide failed to score in the Tax Conduct category. They were:

• Good Energy
• Octopus Energy
• EDF
• E.ON
• Sainsbury's Energy
• British Gas 

Good Energy scored zero following its acquisition by International Holding Company (IHC) – the latter could hold a world tour of tax havens among its subsidiaries, including the Cayman Islands, Switzerland, and Mauritius. 

How green is nuclear energy?

Nuclear energy does not emit greenhouse gases during power generation. Yet, it remains controversial. Nuclear power relies on uranium, a non-renewable fuel source obtained from mining. It produces radioactive waste, which must be stored carefully underground.

There are already 5,600 canisters of radioactive waste stored in the UK. It is unclear what the environmental impacts of storing radioactive waste will be in the future.

Andrew Blowers, author of The Legacy of Nuclear Power and a former member of the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management, set up to advise the British government on how and where to store nuclear waste, said:

“There is no reliable method to warn future generations about the existence of nuclear waste dumps. The nuclear legacy stretches into the far future; it poses a risk to environments and human health for periods which extend well beyond our comprehension.”

There are also worries about the connection to nuclear weapons. If lots more countries are going to get nuclear technology in order to decarbonise, might that lead to nuclear weapons proliferation?

In recent years, support for nuclear power has declined significantly around the world. The lower cost of renewables, and a better understanding of how abundant renewables supply is, has meant that the downsides to nuclear are now more easily avoided.

Community energy movement 

Community energy refers to renewable energy projects that are controlled by local communities.

Previous Best Buy Ripple went into administration in early 2025 in a blow to the growing movement for community-powered renewables. But the story isn’t one of total collapse. Ripple’s wind and solar projects remain in cooperative ownership, and most appear to be operating for the benefit of the members. This is because Ripple did not itself own the projects, but was instead just the management company that set up each co-op. These co-op boards then stepped in to handle day-to-day operations when it folded.

While some investors may have lost money, the continued functioning of the projects is a rare silver lining. In a sector where collapse often spells total wipeout, Ripple’s cooperative model has quietly proved that decentralisation and co-operative ownership can offer a measure of resilience when the corporate centre fails.

Co-op Energy’s “Community Power Tariff” is one way to support community energy projects. Through a partnership with Octopus and Younity Cooperative, this tariff is fully powered by over 300 community-owned solar, wind, and hydroelectric projects.

Switching tariffs

If you want to switch to a more ethical energy supplier, Citizens Advice has a step-by-step guide to switching energy suppliers.

Additional research by Richard Stirling.