Last one out turns off the lights: Every flick of a switch impacts the planet

Kate Hughes finds that using renewable electricity in the home isn’t always glamourous or easy – and she’s not ready to go off-grid just yet

With wind turbines out of action in the mini-heatwave, the UK was forced to fire up coal power plants (Getty/iStock)

Very occasionally, going green seems to teeter on the brink of being quite a stylish way of life, what with all the minimalism and natural textures.

But the opposite has been true in our house this week. I blame the weather.

It won’t have escaped your notice nor, I suspect, your sense of bitter irony that we’ve had to dust off a couple of coal-fired power stations again because the warm weather has stilled a bunch of wind turbines.

Barely a month after the government confirmed renewables stumped up a record 43 per cent of the UK’s electricity last year, it feels like a step backwards, not least because part of the reason for firing up the power stations was cost.

I know the feeling. Right now my inbox is being bombarded with dire warnings about energy cost hikes.

I have to admit, it took an embarrassingly long time for it to dawn on me that just because my electricity bill says I am paying for 100 per cent renewable electricity, that’s not actually what’s keeping the lights on.

Instead – and bear with me here because I’m still not entirely on top of the physics of it all – the supplier has dumped my nice virtuous energy quota into the great electricity river along with the carbon- and pollutant-emitting output from all those other, less eco-oriented, energy companies.

In other words, flicking switches will continue to add to our problems until we’re all 100 per cent renewable.

So this week we’ve mostly been redoubling our efforts to curb the electricity we use. This was where the problems started, especially when it came to feeding a family made newly ravenous with the efforts of a new school term – and that was just the adults.

As part of a bid to rid ourselves of the need for a traditional gas supply, the cooker is a fully electric job. Though there’s no room in our snug kitchen for the dizzying convenience of a microwave, the magic effects of a saucepan lid have not passed me by when it comes to energy efficiency, even if nagging everyone within earshot to “put a lid on it and twist the knob off” does make me sound unnervingly like my innuendo-loving Nain. (Google it. Or better still, Ecosia it.)

Clearly we’re not on the verge of giving up the fridge, spending the approaching murky months illuminated only by candlelight or moving to an off-grid hut in the woods

Buoyed by the mini triumphs of dialling down the energy use I freely admit to becoming a bit overconfident.

The combined power of an inspiring visit to the kitchens of the local National Trust country pile to see how they did it in the pre-electric days and an ill-fated late-night online search left me in absolutely no doubt that I too could keep food cool using the power of water evaporation alone or halve the amount of energy used for cooking with the particularly careful use of residual heat.

The Waltons would have been proud. At least until the weather dramatically bucked its ideas up and we spent the beginning of the week wondering if the general sense of nausea was borderline heatstroke or something we ate. Instagram-worthy eco-living it was not.

Energy-saving, with its draught excluders, lightbulb switching and working out which way your roof faces in the hope that solar panels might be the answer to our prayers, is not the most glamorous aspect to going green. But more than a quarter of the average Brit’s annual carbon footprint came from domestic energy use in 2020 according to the Carbon Trust – a figure I found surprisingly high, not least because so much more focus is afforded to trendier aspects of going green, like plant-based diets, no-fly pledges and bamboo straws.

Clearly, we’re not on the verge of giving up the fridge, spending the approaching winter months illuminated only by candlelight or moving to an off-grid hut in the woods. Our lives are very much on-grid for now, which means driving down energy use needs much more of our collective attention.

The Energy Saving Trust is a veritable bible of tips and tricks for all those keen to drive down their domestic carbon emissions as well as their bills, while Love Food Hate Waste is a genuinely authoritative starting point for those keen to extend the shelf life of their perishables in ways that don’t risk food poisoning.

Meanwhile, if you’re the last one out, please turn off the lights.