Green as can be! Stroomranking 2021 is out now.

At ENTRNCE, we like a good end-of-year ranking list just as much as the next group of people. In the Netherlands, one of the more prominent lists in electricity is the “Research Sustainability Dutch Power Suppliers” a.k.a. the “Stroomranking”. The Stroomranking - created by the well-respected non-profits Natuur&Milieu, Consumentenbond and WISE - ranks electricity suppliers on how sustainable they are. The aim is to “provide transparency on the sustainability of the power market and stimulate Dutch suppliers to make sustainable decisions”. They do this separately for the consumer market and for business, and get a lot of coverage with their results.

Suppliers are graded between 1.0 and 10.0 based on their investments, procurement and supply. No less than five suppliers are given a 10.0 in this year’s consumer market ranking, with three of those also scoring a 10.0 in the business market. What does a supplier have to do to receive an absolute perfect score?

According to the report: “… is active in all three parts playing a role in the rating: investments, procurement and supply. The produced electricity can be supplied back-to-back to their own customers, giving this supplier the maximum score.”
For one of the other suppliers with a perfect 10.0 nothing is mentioned with regards to investments, so apparently sustainable procurement and supply without any investments is just as good.

Even on our best days, we know we are not perfect at ENTRNCE. And we dare say: no-one in the power market is perfect. To increase the transparency value of the Stroomranking, three points could be improved in next year’s edition:

• Be honest that ‘back-to-back’ supply simply does not exist yet. For anyone unversed in the logic of the power market, ‘back-to-back’ implies that anything I’m consuming will at any point in time be covered by simultaneous sustainable generation. This is a dream in today’s world. A dream that people – including us at ENTRNCE – are working hard on to make reality, but a dream none the less. This concept is most often called 24/7 carbon free energy, and how well suppliers do on 24/7 should be taken into account for the ranking.
• Be honest that today we still need fossil generation to keep the system stable. Even if only for back-up, the fossil power plants are still essential parts of the power system. Whether we like it or not. It doesn’t seem fair to subtract points by definition from the larger suppliers that own and operate these plants. Without them, the system would not work. Similarly, if all suppliers would score a 10.0 in the rating, we would have a seriously unstable power supply. That can’t be right.
• On procurement, the rating seems to differentiate between sustainable (based on PPAs) and unsustainable (sourced on wholesale markets). There are more options though. At ENTRNCE, we provide our users the possibility to procure electricity directly from the seller, even without having closed a PPA. This peer2peer option deserves to be rated on its merits.

Hopefully the Stroomranking will include these points in next years ranking. We are always glad to help increase transparency in the power market!

Source: Stroomranking 2021