As you will have read in an earlier post, we were caught up in a forced change of electricity provider at the end of 2009. We found out about it in late January 2010. We signed the two year contract with AGL to provide 100% green electricity, then had to sit back and wait until the next meter read. That occurred in mid-April 2010.
Once we were with AGL, we thought everything was fine. That was until our first electricity bill arrived in late July. While the amount of the bill seemed reasonable, I couldn't find any indication on it that we were on 100% green electricity. Many phone calls later, it turned out there had been a mistake made when our account was set up, and we were on black electricity. That has now been rectified, and I have an updated contract stating that we are on 100% green electricity from that date forward. It did leave us in the position, however, of having had seven months worth of black electricity detracting from our green efforts (four months with Energy Australia as the emergency supplier, three months with AGL).
To counter this, I purchased one-off carbon offsets through Climate Friendly to cover the 4.98 MWhs of electricity that we used. We also needed to cover a flight we had to make to Alice Springs in June to attend a family wedding. That gave us a total of 6.4 tonnes to offset. Although more expensive, I purchased the Gold Standard credits, as they are "an independently audited, globally applicable best practice methodology for project development that delivers high quality carbon credits of premium value." (source: https://climatefriendly.com/shop_business click on the "Info" icon next to Gold Standard). You can view our new certificate here.
