Our renewable electricity

SSE renewable electricity allows you to reduce your carbon footprint and show customers and other stakeholders your commitment to the environment and sustainability.

SSE renewable electricity also enables you to report zero emissions under the Greenhouse Gas Protocol using the market-based method for your Scope 2 purchased electricity.

Launched in 1998, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHGP) seeks to develop internationally accepted greenhouse gas accounting and reporting standards and tools to promote their adoption worldwide.

The GHGP Corporate Standard outlines a standard set of accounting and reporting rules for developing corporate inventories. It identifies and categorises the emissions from all the operations that together comprise an organisation.

Since October 2013, it has been mandatory for FTSE 100 companies to report GHG emissions in their annual reports.

On 1 April 2019, the UK government’s Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting (SECR) policy came into force. SECR requires around 12,000 companies to report their annual energy consumption and emissions from the energy they buy. As of April 2021, this must also include figures from the previous year. Find out how renewable electricity can help your SECR reporting.

All our renewable electricity is sourced from wind and hydro assets wholly or partly owned by SSE Renewables, our sister company in the SSE Group. The energy market regulator Ofgem provides SSE with a Renewable Energy Guarantee of Origin (REGO) certificate for each megawatt hour of renewable electricity we generate. These are matched to the purchased electricity on your contract.

REGOs show that the electricity has been generated from renewable sources. Ofgem issues one REGO for every megawatt hour of renewable power that’s fed into the national grid.

With SSE renewable electricity, you get your electricity through the national grid as normal. The difference is that each megawatt hour of your electricity is matched to one REGO, so you can be sure it’s from a renewable source.

The REGO scheme is designed to increase transparency for consumers who wish to buy renewable energy.

You can report your Scope 2 emissions using the “market-based” reporting method under the GHGP Corporate Standard. Each megawatt hour of the electricity you buy is matched to one REGO, so you can report zero emissions for electricity.

The latest amendment to the GHGP Corporate Standard, Scope 2 Guidance (January 2015), introduced changes to the way in which organisations should report their greenhouse gas emissions.

The key change is that organisations now have to report their emissions according to a “location-based” or “market-based” method. The reason for this change is that organisations have increasingly demanded information about the sources producing their energy, and attributes about that production.

The location-based method reflects the average emissions intensity of grids on which energy consumption occurs (using mostly grid-average emission factor data), while the market-based method reflects emissions from electricity that companies have purposefully chosen (or their lack of choice).