If all else fails, embrace the ping

The microwave is making me so damned happy right now it’s verging on alarming

You’ve been microwaving your food completely wrong, according to a Tik Tok star. (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Appliances never used to spark this much joy. Maybe I’m approaching middle age faster than I realised. But regardless of existential dread, heating WFH lunches for one has never been such a rapid and efficient revelation as it has in recent weeks.

Even if I have exploded a few foodstuffs for lack of practice and caught myself taking that uncertain step back the first time I pressed “go” on the new – to us at least – gadget.

No, I haven’t accidentally woken up in the 1980s. We just haven’t had such a miraculous tool in our house for a while, mostly because we tried to cut down on our consumption in general when the last one pinged, incurably, for the final time. We didn’t want to go out and buy endless stuff without being sure we really needed it – especially the kind of small electrical appliances that contribute so badly towards the UK’s runaway e-waste problem.

But with the kids consistently back at school for the first time in 18 months and the other half abandoning the home working habit as fast as possible, the cost and carbon involved in making myself anything more than a sandwich wasn’t sitting comfortably.

A jacket potato and half a can of beans is not worth firing up an oven for, and there’s only so much batch cooking you can cope with on a working Wednesday.

Besides, there have been few easy wins on this green journey so far and I wasn’t going to let this one pass me by. Cue microwaving with giddy abandon. I am currently exploring the wide and varied world of mug cakes the way the rest of the world did in around 2008.

We’re hardly the only household with one eye on our energy usage as temperatures start to slide and the clocks go back. Thank goodness that energy is “100 per cent renewable” at least.

Except that it really isn’t.

We’ve talked before about the mix of sources supplying all our homes with electricity, and how you may have paid for green energy, but that’s not the all that comes surging out of the socket. Why? Because of our river-like energy system, whose tributaries of energy are sourced from gas, coal, nuclear, wind, hydro, biomass and everything else.

The mix is roughly 40 per cent renewables, 38 per cent natural gas, and 16 per cent nuclear, with the rest coming from coal and “other” sources.

Sure, there’s an argument that paying for 100-per-cent renewable energy still makes a difference because each of us is altering the mix in a tiny way. But that assumes there really is an equivalent proportion of green electricity being dumped in upstream.

Which doesn’t seem to be the case very often, largely because of the way renewable energy certificates are awarded, managed and sold.

The energy regulator Ofgem awards one Renewable Energy Guarantee of Origin or REGO certificate for every megawatt hour of energy a company generates through renewable sources. At the end of the year the energy company gathers all the certificates up and sends them back to the regulator to prove their energy has been sustainably sourced.

If your supplier generates their renewably sourced energy themselves, the way Ecotricity does, it’s all reasonably straightforward.

If they don’t, the idea is that they buy the certificates alongside the megawatt hour of renewably sourced energy they then pass on to us as customers. But get this – the certificates can be bought separately. They don’t even need to be originally generated in the UK.

Which is surely an insanely basic admin error, but one with serious consequences. Energy companies simply buy the certificates (for about 50p each I understand) and source their energy from wherever is cheapest, while still going on to claim the energy they’ve just sold you, at around three megawatt hours a year, is 100-per-cent renewable. All for £1.50 a year.

You’ll be pleased to hear there’s a huge fight being waged behind the scenes on this issue and other related problems, but so far little has changed.

All of which means we need to save harder for solar panels. And turn the lights off when we leave rooms in the meantime. And double check the bulbs are LEDs, and switch everything off at the wall, and – my personal favourite – embrace the ping.