bensg
Joined 1 year ago
Karma
23
Submissions
9
Member since
Nov 2
Recent submissions
Comment · 2 months ago
Comment · 1 year ago
We're already exploring calculating supplier-level carbon intensities (CO2e), for which hourly matching is a necessary precursor. A toggle between matching score and CO2e rankings isn't a bad idea. Should have some updates in the coming weeks.
Comment · 1 year ago
Thanks for the feedback. You raise three important points that I'll address in turn:
1. Biomass: We report renewables as defined by Ofgem (the UK energy regulator), which for better or worse includes biomass. However, we recognise this is contentious. To address this, we show the breakdown of generating technologies for each supplier so users can see the composition. But regardless, your point is valid and has been raised several times this week, so we have a PR open to add a filter that lets viewers exclude biomass if they disagree with the UK's legal definition.
2. Nuclear: Our initial focus was on renewable power (where intermittency is highest), but we'll be adding nuclear to the index in the next few weeks. This will increase the scores for EDF, Octopus Energy, and British Gas in particular, who purchase the majority of nuclear power. We've called this out in various places on the index (e.g., on the EDF page: https://matched.energy/clean-power-index/edf-energy).
3. Load shifting: Because we measure generation and demand at a half-hourly level, we do account for load shifting that suppliers like Octopus incentivise through agile tariffs. This is actually one of the key advantages of our approach over historic annual accounting; the half hourly temporal granularity means we reward load shifting behaviour.
Comment · 1 year ago
HN post is linking to our launch announcement. Full index ranking all major UK suppliers is here: https://matched.energy/clean-power-index
Comment · 1 year ago
It's absolutely an international problem. As we get more renewables on the grid, we need to move away from the annual accounting mechanism that hides daily and seasonal intermittency.
The amount of open data that's available in the UK is laudable and makes our analysis possible. But we do have some theories about how we can expand to other countries. Australia will be an interesting one, given renewable penetration.
Comment · 1 year ago
Exactly. That’s the core problem the Index exposes. Under current UK rules (and indeed in most countries), suppliers can legally call their power “100% renewable” even when it’s mostly gas at times of low renewable generation. They can do this by offsetting the non-renewable deficit with certificates from sunny summer hours.
What we've tried to do at Matched is make this fact visible, showing which suppliers actually deliver clean power hour by hour rather than just on paper. A number of suppliers (notably Good Energy and Octopus) perform surprisingly well, be procuring renewable power that aligns well with their consumer's demand.
Inspired by this post on personal software[1], Sidenote scratches an itch that isn't being met (at least for me) by raw markdown, IDE plugins, non-local tools like Notion, or Obsidian.
It creates a shared local space where both human and LLM can edit/write text in a nice rich text editor, where the human can also questions/delegate tasks via comments. Sort of like the commenting feature built into the Claude desktop app, but assuming that both human and LLM will be involved in editing the doc.
Makes for a much neater way to stay more actively in the loop when working with an LLM, without trading away the benefits that I think these models can bring to planning/research/analysis/whatever else you've got it doing.
[1] https://leerob.com/personal-software