E088 - Jon Fletcher from Brakkn

Welcome back to the Green Element Podcast, where we feature business leaders and innovators transforming their operations to be more environmentally and socially sustainable. I'm your host, Will Richardson, and I can't wait to meet our guest today and help you on your journey of sustainability.

Today we've got John from Bracken. He runs a business that helps you switch to renewables really, really easily. If you're a small business, then you can switch to renewables. And he's— the process that you go through, he has— it's all about behavior change and communications for him. And working in the industry, I totally get it. And yes, he's absolutely right. And then of course residential, and if you're living in a house, which on the whole most people do live in houses or flats, then you should be buying renewables. And he makes it really easy for you to be able to buy renewables. You may have heard of the Big Clean Switch, and that's Bracken, and they were the people behind that. And I hope you really enjoy the podcast. Thank you very much for subscribing. John, welcome to the Green Element Podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today. We know each other through WhatsApp groups and online. Wow, there you go. That's the age we're living in now. We've met each other online.

Yeah, it's nice to actually see your face, if only virtually.

Thank you so much for coming on the podcast and talking about what you do. And on that note, I will let you introduce yourself.

Thank you. Yeah, pleasure to be here. I'm John Fletcher, the co-founder co-founder and managing director of Bracken, which is a B Corp that helps homes and businesses switch to renewable electricity.

Brilliant. And it would be great to explore what that is and how that works and the process that you have to go through for that, because that is a massive part of how we're going to shift to a more sustainable economy, isn't it? And we've seen the prices of renewables dropping, and it's because more and more people are shifting that way. And we all know the subsidization is rampant in the fossil fuel industry and not so rampant in the renewable sector. So we are going to have to be doing it ourselves. If I was a business, could you take us through how it works and what's— how you do it?

Yeah, so I suppose to take a big picture of the whole business, my background is in behavior change. And fundamentally what we're trying to do is unblock behavioral barriers to people making decisions that help the environment around their energy procurement. Broadly speaking, they're the same for businesses and homes. There is a sense that renewable energy is going to cost them a lot, which is no longer the case, even with those fossil fuel subsidy discrepancies included. There is a sense that switching energy in general is going to be just too much hassle. Then there is a general distrust in the energy sector. we've created the brands within Bracken to specifically address those issues. It works slightly differently with the commercial energy switching that we do because there's a little bit more complexity in the commercial market, so we have to be a bit more hands-on. We function through what looks much more like a traditional commercial energy brokerage, but only working with suppliers of 100% renewable electricity, and go out of our way to make the process of switching, identifying a supplier, understanding exactly what the differences are between different renewable tariffs, and then actually making this switch as easy as possible. And then the same applies really on the domestic side, the key difference being a lot of that process is automated, and we've worked very hard on trying to create a customer experience that makes it as easy as possible.

Would you call yourself an energy broker then?

We would on the commercial side, yeah. I think we probably are close— more closely aligned with if you were trying to put us into an existing parcel price comparison site on the domestic side. But yeah, we're not particularly concerned with the labels. I think, you know, we are what we are. And yeah, energy broker and price comparison site probably sums it up.

Right. Okay, brilliant. And are there any companies that you think are the shining light of renewables?

Do you mean suppliers?

Yeah, suppliers.

I think there are a whole host of inspiring suppliers, and I'm not just saying that and sort of sitting on the fence. One of the questions that we get— I'll come back and answer that in a second, but just to kind of loop around, one of the questions that we get asked a lot by our customers is which supplier is the best. And the actual answer to that depends very much on your individual preferences as a consumer, because the detail of the renewable offerings of each supplier and the ways in which they help the environment vary in numerous ways. And just to give you an example of that, Good Energy and Ecotricity, 2 of the kind of stalwarts of the renewable energy space. Good Energy has invested huge amounts in really supporting community energy in the UK. They plough huge amounts of money into both building originally and now buying electricity from community suppliers. Ecotricity, on the other hand, has invested hugely in the UK electric vehicle charging network and still owns quite a lot of their own generation sites. And which of those balance out as being better or worse for the environment depends very much on your own personal preference, as much as it's very hard to quantify them in ways that make them comparable. So what we've done with the work that we do was to say what people need is a clear-cut distinction that says all of these suppliers and tariffs are good and anything that's not in this list is bad. And beyond that, we can allow them to make their own decisions if they want to, but we one of the barriers, as I was going back to earlier, was around this perception of hassle, was just a sense that the whole world is too complex. And so our goal has been to take the pain away and to just have a very binary, this is green and this isn't. And I think some of the work we've got ongoing is for those customers who do want the greater level of detail, making that available without putting everyone else off. But in terms of quantifying which supplier is sort of standing out, to go back to your original question, it does come down to personal perspective.

Yeah, I can see that. I can see that. I'm an eco-christy person, but Dale Vince, literally, it's because of Dale Vince. It's not even because of the— it is because of the company actually and what they do. And I just love that maverick style of running a business and pushing, you know, the vegan football team. And now he's got his own food company and the fact that he converted his Porsche into an electric, you know, just, I love all that. And the fact that he doesn't look like a managing director of a massive corporation.

That's it. And he's done so much that's different. And I think that highlights the point exactly because, you know, you could equally pull out some of the newer brands like Octopus who I think are unashamed about their goal of trying to get into everyone's homes. The technological investment that they are embarking upon in order to make that happen is going to have such a transformative effect on the way that we consume and even sell energy within our own homes. It becomes very difficult to pick one out.

What are they doing? What is Octopus doing?

A huge amount of investment in things like electric vehicle tariffs and time-of-use charging. They have been trying to lead the way in terms of some of their export tariffs, which will replace some of the previous subsidies there were for home solar, so that we move to a stage where homes stop being consumers of energy from the grid and start being almost both generation sites and batteries within a grid infrastructure, which allows the grid to be run more efficiently and homes to be run more efficiently. And they're really sort of leading the way along with some other kind of examples in that space. And I think they're exciting for that reason. And, you know, you could pick out a couple of other suppliers that are exciting for different reasons again. So I think overall, I guess the conclusion is that there is an enormous amount to be positive about in the renewable energy space at the moment and a lot of reasons to really get excited about it.

And what are your thoughts on companies? Because you've got companies that only buy renewables. Is there a place for— or should they be investing money into their profits back into renewables in order to grow it? Because there is a thought that what they're doing is they're just taking what renewables is out there and then just making money off the renewables, when actually what we really need is aggressive Re— you know, investments into renewables in order to grow renewables.

So I didn't know this was going to come up this soon.

No, I honestly didn't. You said, let's, let's go by fly, and I'm like, okay.

It always comes up. So fundamentally what you're talking about is it tends to get badged under REGOs, or Renewable Energy Guarantees of Origin, which are the certificates that are given to renewable energy generators every time they put a unit, a megawatt of renewable power into the grid. And there has been criticism of those, the use of those certificates, because suppliers will buy electricity on the wholesale market, which is the cheapest way of buying electricity, and then go and buy a matching number of REGOs from renewable electricity generators. Fundamentally, our position is that the most important thing for us as a consumer is that every unit of electricity that we take out of the grid is matched by an equivalent unit of renewable electricity going into the grid. And that is exactly the function that RGOs perform. And the kind of logical test that you can place is, well, if every house was on a renewable— was on a RGO-backed tariff, that would mean that all of the electricity that was being taken out of the grid by those houses had to be backed by renewable electricity going into the grid. therefore the grid has to be 100% green.

Okay.

The difficulty with RGOs— well, not the difficulty, but the reason that people often level criticism at them is that because for such a long time government efforts to increase the amount of renewable capacity in the UK actually outstripped consumer demand, the amount of renewable electricity going into the grid has significantly exceeded the demand. And so the value of a RGO has been almost negligible because not enough people were buying REGO-backed power. And we find it quite frustrating that an argument that's deployed against REGOs is that they're too— they cost too little, so you should avoid buying them because they make it easy for renewable suppliers to green their energy, when in fact what we need to be doing is the opposite and catching up that gap between the supply and demand so that the value of REGOs goes up and they start acting the way they were intended as a market driver.

Okay.

So yeah, I think the other kind of aspects to that conversation is the alternative to RGOs is where a supplier purchases their electricity directly from a generator through something called a power purchase agreement. And that does have the advantage of meaning that they're not purchasing through the wholesale market, so that you know that every penny that you spend on your bill is going to a renewable electricity generator. But the challenge is that at the moment, those direct relationships in terms of purchasing are much more inflexible and therefore expensive in terms of the overall market. And this is where our other philosophical kind of difference with people who critique REGOs comes in. It is our belief that our overarching goal has to be to get to 100% renewable as quickly as we can. And if we're to use market demand as a driver for that, we need everyone to be on renewable electricity tariffs. And the challenge with the 100% PPA-backed tariffs is that they're very expensive, and therefore they're only the preserve of the well-off. And, you know, both in terms of environmental and more broad social goals, I find the notion that we should employ a degree of philosophical purity over this that effectively disenfranchises vast numbers of people from being able to switch to a renewable supplier and have an impact in terms of driving the sector forwards. I find that kind of quite distasteful, so hence why we're big fans of rego-back tariffs.

Yeah, no, we are as well. But let's— what I'd like to do is just kind of go back a second. And, um, what I was really wanting to ask on that question was that you've got companies that only buy renewables and they don't make renewables, as opposed to, say, Good Energy and Ecotricity that actually do make renewables. Is it, is it a good thing that we can buy— And I don't really like Bulb or Octopus? Do Octopus make renewables?

No, so I think Ecotricity is one of the only suppliers, possibly Green Energy UK, but one of the only suppliers, and actually some of the Big 6, that actually owns their own generating capacity. I think Green Energy sold most of theirs now. From a— I don't think it matters, but I think it's probably not I think the parallel that I always come back to is a grocery market where you wouldn't expect a retailer to also be growing the produce.

Yeah.

Retailers are great at retail and farmers are great at farming. And there's no reason to expect both to be good at both. And also what it takes to be a good retailer or supplier is very different to what it takes to be a good generator. generation is hugely capital intensive and takes 5 to 10 years in sort of lead times. As a supplier of energy, you can't possibly hope to plan out your sourcing of power in that way because, you know, you're aiming to grow your customer base over months or years rather than, you know, 5 to 10 years. So I'm not sure it's realistic for us to expect suppliers in general to be generators of energy as well as resellers of energy. But I'm also not sure that it's kind of the right answer.

Yeah, no, that's really interesting, really interesting. And I've never actually thought about it like that because I've never thought about it from the grocery point of view. And you're absolutely right, you wouldn't expect Tesco to be growing all their own Vegetables.

No, and I mean, it plays back to that wholesale point I was making as well in respect of you don't expect every shop you go into to have direct relationships with farmers because that would mean that they were— there was huge wastage in the system. They were having to effectively— everyone was overbuying in order to make sure they had enough stock on a colossal scale. And the same inflexibility occurs in the energy market. Wholesale markets create the ability to flatten out supply and demand and reduce wastage, and that reduces cost. So Whilst we still have a proportion of the electricity in the UK supplied by fossil fuels, and we hope that's, you know, going to be for as little time as possible, then for those fossil fuels to be part of the wholesale electricity market is just a fact of life. But the wholesale electricity market shouldn't be criticized for that because it's playing a fundamental role.

Yeah, I've got, I've got that great Android app that shows you exactly what's going on with— I think it's definitely on iOS as well— that shows you exactly what's going on with the electricity at that moment in time. You must— you'll know it.

I mean, I'm not sure of the exact app, but there's a really great site that WWF developed in partnership with the National Grid that shows you the kind of carbon intensity of the electricity that's being generated in your particular region of the UK at one time. And I think those tools are really great at bringing that to life.

Yeah, and it's But what always surprises me is that you've got that percentage of energy that is nuclear. It's actually less coal now. It's either nuclear or biomass or gas.

Yeah.

And usually gas or nuclear. And it's usually about 20% or 30% of the market on the whole. That's— and I wonder how we can— and I'm not asking, you know, how are we going to solve the world's problems, but like, you know your industry and you know your market really well. Do you see us being able to get out of that baseload more easily? Or, you know—

Yeah, 100%, but it's going to take a lot of different levers. I mean, I sort of believe wholeheartedly that sourcing our— effectively our fuel directly from the sun rather than sourcing our fuel, the sun, via being buried in the ground for a million years just inherently makes more sense. And, you know, philosophically we have to be able to get there. I think the mechanisms for achieving that are very varied. So, and you're not just talking about electricity either, you're also talking about sort of other forms of energy such as heat. I think some of the measures I mentioned in relation to Octopus earlier around using technology to redistribute when demand and supply is required is a really fundamental part of that, because if we can get away from this situation where there are certain times of the day where the grid has enormous strain placed upon it and other times of the day where there's very little, And we can start to link that through storage to the times of the day when renewables may or may not be generating more. I think demand reduction is another huge component which, you know, isn't linked to electricity generation per se, but we have to find ways of reducing the amount that we consume as well as moving what we do consume over to renewable sources. And then on the heat side, things like switching over to lower carbon forms like hydrogen away from natural gas. will almost certainly be a part of the solution. And that, you know, there it's frustrating we're not making greater progress in terms of some of the pilots that are being rolled out in the UK.

It's such an interesting market, isn't it? And I guess we don't really know what it's going to look like. I mean, you've just brought in 3, 4 different strands and elements that are going to catastrophically change the energy markets, you know, that the energy storage and where we're getting it and how we're using it and what we're using. It's interesting. It is.

From someone whose focus is squarely on consumer behavior, I think one of the most challenging and fascinating areas, and also one area that we're kind of in the process of working on new products with, is it's all very well to know that this incredibly sophisticated technology is inevitably going to arrive, but the question is, Who is going to translate that into language that consumers can understand and deploy in their own homes? And the answer probably, in truth, lies in taking away as much of the work and complexity for them as possible and just giving them the end result, which is that they're warm and they're comfortable. But I think that's one of the big challenges that we have going forward is, A, how all of this stuff starts to operate together, and then B, however that gets conveyed to consumers in a way that they understand what it is that they're buying.

Yeah, yeah, it's great. So how did you get into this?

Naively.

Brilliant.

So I was lucky enough to start working with a great organization called Purpose who are based out of the US. They're effective. They call themselves movement generators, and they'd won a pot of money from the IKEA Foundation to look at how they could accelerate consumer action on climate in the run-up to the Paris 2015 agreement. And in the UK, we started casting around to look at where we could make a difference, and renewable energy seemed to be a good point because most people thought it was really expensive, when in fact renewable electricity tariffs were competing with some of the cheaper tariffs on the market. And the take-up of renewable tariffs at that point was incredibly low. I mean, it's grown quite a lot since then, in no small part to the growth of some of the newer 100% renewable. But it felt as though it was a really good starting point and also a really good jumping-off point to start talking about the other changes that people can make in their lives, because saving someone £200 to £300 on their energy bills, which is what we save on average, is a really good point to start talking to them about some of the other things, changes that they could be making. So, um, we started setting up Big Clean Switch, which is the domestic switching brand that runs under Bracken, uh, and that has evolved to where we are today.

It's, um, and you've done really, really well with it, haven't you? You've, you've got a huge amount of take-up with the Big Clean Switch. How did that, how did that come about? And what's, what was the What was the idea behind it?

Yeah, so I mean, I guess everyone's always frustrated by their own progress. We'd certainly want to be further ahead than where we are right now, but the bulk of our progress to date has been— we had a notion that because people distrust the energy market so much, working in partnership with big organizations and almost using their authenticity and their voice to talk to people about switching to renewables would be a more effective means of having that conversation than just throwing ourselves into the energy supply market like any other energy supply business. I think we were right to a degree. We, in the partnerships that we've run, have had much greater penetration into audiences that were previously disengaged with the energy market than other forms of energy switching, but it is a challenge to build those relationships with partners. And so I guess we've moved, even though I think you're right that we're incredibly proud of our track record. We work with companies like IKEA, Ben& Jerry's, WWF, Tesco's. We would like to be further ahead than we are, and one of the things we're doing at the moment is starting to explore opening up new channels where we can talk directly to consumers as well as working through those partnerships. But yeah, we've come an incredibly long way and we're very lucky and privileged to work with some incredible organizations.

No, it's brilliant. There's absolute— it's amazing what you've done. Absolutely amazing what you guys have done. And how big is your team and are you stretched around the UK or are you focused on— you focused in particular area of the UK?

Stretched, I think, is a good word. There are 5 of us. We're split between Bournemouth and London for reasons that are very dull and complex, although it's a great boon because it meant that I got to go down to Bournemouth last weekend and cycle along the seafront, which was good for my well-being.

Brilliant.

well as getting a hell of a lot done. Yeah, so we're a very small team. I think that's another sort of thing that I'm very proud of, that we've remained incredibly lean whilst achieving a great deal.

It means you're giving a lot more back, doesn't it? You're able to do a lot more.

It does, yeah. I think you always want to do more than you are, but I think we're at a really exciting point in terms of the business. You know, in being boring, a lot of the underlying processes and systems that have built up on an ad hoc basis are being hauled into line with sort of growing up as a business. And I think that's putting us in a really good position just at a time when the world is crying out for the things that we do. So I'm really excited about where we go next.

And do you have Many of our listeners will be businesses and organizations. Is it easy to buy energy through you? And is it— I mean, is the sign-up— is it as easy as the Big Green Switch was? Or, you know, how can our listeners work with you?

So, I mean, I would hate it if they sort of tried to switch to us and found the answer was no on the easy question, because, you know, that's one of our starting principles. So it would be a sad day. The overall process in terms of businesses is slightly more complex because we need them to give us permission to go and get some data from their existing suppliers. And the energy market is so archaic that that tends to be a bit of a Oh, it's horrendous.

It's actually horrendous. Letter of authority.

Exactly.

Bane of our lives. And every energy company wants it to be written slightly differently as well.

Exactly. And they'll pick out anything they can to sort of render it invalid because they know that that is the start of the process of them losing the customer. And so that can slow it down. But, you know, we're well versed in the vagaries of the demands of the energy suppliers, and so therefore can make that as easy as possible. We've got, you know, templates and things we can use to streamline it. Once that's happened, it's a much more conventional exercise in we go away and get the quotes for you, come back, tell you what's the cheapest. On the commercial side, we're slightly less stringent in the criteria that we apply to the renewable tariffs than we are on the domestic, just because Companies often operate under very different circumstances, and if it's a choice between, for example, switching them to a biomass-backed tariff or not switching them to a renewable tariff at all, then I would prefer to switch them to a biomass tariff. But we will explain when we provide the costs to you exactly what the difference is between the different tariffs so that you can make an informed choice. And then the other thing we do, which businesses that work with us love, is help them to shout about it to their customers and employees once they've made the switch, because that's obviously as important as actually making the change in itself, is using your role as an influencer to try and encourage the change elsewhere. One of the things that we get most positive feedback over is just a very simple window sticker that works a little bit like TripAdvisor sticker. We do a different color one every year that just says proudly powered by 100% renewable electricity in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, so on. And we get a really positive response to that.

That's brilliant, that's great. And how do you— I mean, do you, from an environmental management point of view, do you run your business sustainably? It'd be weird if you answered no to this, actually.

It would, yeah.

No, we fly everywhere, it's brilliant. I fly from London to Bournemouth on a regular basis.

So, yeah, no, we have fairly strict policies in place around flying. We had to— one of our partners was covering our travel costs for me to go up to Edinburgh recently, and we had to kind of pushed back fairly firmly against their third-party travel booker who was desperate to put us on a plane when we were asking if we were going to take a train. So yeah, certainly travel is part of that, recording and measuring the travel and making sure we make sustainable choices. I think tied into that, we have a soft version of what's kind of the climate perks approach where Wherever possible, we will create additional time for people to work in transit so that they can take slower forms of transport for their holidays as well as for business purposes. Other areas, it's a bit difficult for us because as a small business, and I know this is in common with many others, as a small business that occupies a coworking space, we Do find it difficult to influence the spaces that we're working in, in terms of everything from energy use to waste and resources. But we do what we can, and we are making slow inroads into switching one of the sites that our offices are based in. But yeah, when you're— when you don't have control over those decisions, it's a slightly harder piece of the puzzle.

It is really hard. That whole small business and what impact they can have within coworking spaces comes up a lot. And I think it is a really hard question. And what can you do? And there's actually a business out there, I think, to bring together those small businesses in some kind of app or software to help influence the coworking space owners.

Yeah, I totally agree.

I don't know what that business is because it's— but, and I don't know who that business is, but I actually think there is a— it comes up quite a lot, exactly what you've just said. And it's— but it's that sphere of influence, isn't it? And if you had everyone in that coworking space going, we only want to buy renewables, then they're much more likely to do it.

Maybe we should make this happen, Will, because I mean, we did a bit of research with ED&I and the RE100 back in last sort of autumn to inform a report into this at the kind of larger business end of the spectrum that really was trying to demonstrate the level of frustration that even large businesses are facing with commercial landlords in engaging them in both getting accurate energy data but also switching to renewables, installation of EV charging, etc., etc. It's almost more acute, I think, at the small business end of the scale because it's so much more diffuse.

Yeah.

And I agree that some mechanism for demonstrating the aggregation of demand to both landlords and some of the co-working space owners would be a very valuable asset. We occasionally get asked by our customers to provide them with kind of a standard letter template that sets out the reasons very simply why a landlord should switch, and some of those other tools. So I think there's room to provide support there as well. But yeah, absolutely, it's an area of great frustration for an awful lot of businesses.

I've actually come up with a number of ideas listening and talking to you. I think we should— I wouldn't mind furthering this conversation, 'cause actually today I was writing a workshop for small businesses on how to reduce their impact for the future.

Well, there it is. I'm sure there's a space there.

But I didn't bring energy really into it because it was about the impacts of the business. I'm not going to go into it, but— oh yeah, no, brilliant. That sounds exciting. Great. So, well, thanks so much for talking to us today. It's been— it's so— I think that it's an area that people just don't know huge amounts about, energy, and it is so complicated. It is so complicated. It is changing and has changed massively. Um, I set up a wind turbine cooperative back in 2002.

Wow.

And I remember talking to Ofgem and saying what I was planning on doing And the lady that I spoke to turned around and said, oh, you're going to find that really hard.

Why?

Because energy comes from the north. And I was like, oh, right. So you can't have pockets of people making energy? No, the energy structure, the way that the structure is set up, the grid, it just— that's really hard. It is changing, but it is really hard. And look at us 15 years on, or over 15 years on, how different it is now and how much it has changed.

You know, I think that's a really lovely point to end on because, you know, a lot of us in the climate space get pretty freaked out by the state of things at the moment, but I think It's worth reflecting that huge amounts of change is happening very fast and it's getting faster. And I do think we have it within our grasp to be able to make the difference. I think we just need more people like yourself who are willing to take the leap and pioneer and demonstrate that things aren't as hard as they may once have looked.

Yeah, no, no, they aren't. And there's an awful lot of positivity out there, I think. And yeah, it's good. It's good. Well, thank you so much, John, for today, and thanks for being on the podcast. My pleasure. Take care.

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