The Vegan Power Revolution

Vegan power is the production of electricity or gas that doesn’t involve the use of animals or animal by-products. Our green gas and electricity have been both been certified as vegan by The Vegan Society since November 2018.

We think this is important. If you look hard enough, you’ll find that some energy companies admit to ‘recycling’ dead fish and animal body parts into power, but we believe the energy you buy should be labelled clearly and honestly.

The Vegan Society say: “Ecotricity have a longstanding policy of refusing to buy energy from animal-related sources and have agreements in place with all of their green gas generators, ensuring that any food waste or organic matter that feed their anaerobic digestion sites are free from animal by-products."

The feedstock of all the sites Ecotricity uses can be checked through the independent Official Information Portal on Anaerobic Digestion. This means we can be confident in Ecotricity’s adherence to vegan energy.”

At the moment, while all energy providers have to declare the fuel mix they use, they don’t have to declare whether animals are used in the energy they produce. We think this is wrong.

Fundamentally, green energy is electricity or gas that’s produced using renewable resources, not traditional fossil fuels – but there’s nothing that stops animals being used in the supply chain of ‘green’ energy.

Many green energy companies, like Good Energy, Bulb, and Octopus Energy, supply electricity that’s been generated using animals or animal by-products.

So switching to vegan power is essential if we’re going to be able to generate electricity and gas in the future.

Animal agriculture has such a huge impact on global carbon emissions, so much that according to a study undertaken by researchers at the Oxford Martin School, “a widespread adoption of a meat free diet could see emissions drop by 63 per cent […] or 70 per cent if veganism were taken up.”

Switching to a vegan diet is one of the biggest ways you can cut your personal carbon emissions according to the WWF's Livewell report.

Research by Poore & Nemecek published by the BBC illustrated that over a quarter (26%) of all global emissions came from food. And of that 26%, almost 60% of emissions were related to animal products.

And then there’s the gases from the actual animals to consider. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently admitted that methane (CH4) produced by livestock “represents over a quarter of the emissions from the agriculture economic sector”

And its not just emissions of harmful greenhouse gases that come from animal farming that have a detrimental effect on the environment, there are huge impacts on global land and water use too.

Studies by PETA (The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) show that while it takes about 1,790 litres of water to grow 1 kilogram of wheat, we’d need to use more than five times that for 1 kilogram of beef.

Since the 1960s, the world’s population has doubled but world meat production has quadrupled and is continuing to grow all the time. As The Vegan Society say:

“This trend will continue to contribute to global warming, widespread pollution, deforestation, land degradation, water scarcity and species extinction. More animals mean more crops are needed to feed them: the planet cannot feed both increasing human and farmed animal populations, especially when there will be between 2-4 billion more human mouths to feed by 2050. “