How green is your recession? Well, very, according to the managing director of a Witney electricity and gas supplier who set up in business 11 years ago with the specific aim of fighting fuel poverty.

Phil Levermore of Ebico, a not-for profit firm which now has 55,000 customers, and growing, said: “Certainly, people are using about ten per cent less energy in the home, much as they are using their cars less than they did — so yes, people are producing less carbon.”

And the decrease in energy consumption is, perhaps paradoxically, good news for Mr Levermore. After all, his avowed intent, from the day he started out in business in 1999, has always been to reduce fuel consumption.

He said: “I wanted to help people — and there are still one and a half million of them in the country and 35,000 in Oxfordshire — who pay for their fuel by feeding coins into meters.

“They pay more for their fuel and are in effect subsidising the rest of us.

”Now I am also helping people take more careful control of their expenditure on energy and at the same time pushing for more large organisations, such as housing associations, to opt into feed-in plans and sell electricity back to the supplier.”

Mr Levermore, who employs five people at Ebico’s Witney office and is now seeking a sixth, originally worked for British Energy before being made redundant and deciding to set up a company selling energy at a one-price-fits-all rate.

He said: “I am a self-confessed energy geek and I simply wanted to make bills clearer to consumers to help them cut energy use. All too often bills contain a sliding tariff or a standing charge, which can be confusing. I thought originally ‘I can do something about that’.”

The coalition Government’s precise policy on cutting energy use is still not completely clear — and to some extent we are in what Mr Levermore calls “limbo” — but what is clear is that Government grants towards green gadgets (such as the windmill on the home that the new Prime Minister, David Cameron, occupied in London before moving into Number 10), solar panels, etc have gone.

But Mr Levermore said: “Cutting them was one of the first actions of the new Government. But the Feed-In Tariff, which allows people to sell electricity back to their supplier is up and working and here to stay.”

A family in a typical three-bedroom semi pays about 13p or 14p a kilowatt hour for electricity it receives but would (depending on how it generated the power) receive about 41.3p per killowatt hour for the electricity it generates itself with solar panels or wind turbines.

The “limbo” area he referred to applies to an an initiative from the previous Labour Government called the Renewable Heat Initiative (RHI), scheduled to become a reality in April 2011, which would allow people to receive money for heat they produce from renewable sources such as solar-heating panels, biomass boilers, or heat exchangers and pumps.

Mr Levermore said: “We are waiting to see whether such a scheme will ever come into force under the new Government.”

And Barbara Hammond, chair of West Oxford Consumer Renewables, a group promoting small-scale energy schemes throughout West Oxford, said: “We don’t know the detail yet about who would pay for the Renewable Heat Incentive, but since the Government is cash-strapped, we are waiting with fingers crossed to see what happens. But we are not holding our breath.”

The Feed-In Tarriff (FIT), on the other hand, is paid to customers by the electricity companies, not by the Government — although Ms Hammond points out that in fact the money comes from consumers.

She said: “The suppliers gather it from the many, by putting extra on the bills, and pay it to the few. It comes from all of us — which is why we think money gained should be re-invested in the community, as we intend to do.”

She added that fuel saving can seem a complicated business, but she praised Ebico’s efforts to simplify matters.

Mr Levermore said that many customers were interested in gaining total control of the energy they use, in other words keeping on top of costs by using computers to track their consumption all day every day.

Such consumers may o,ften (I suggested) be a different kind of person to the original target market of people potentially in fuel poverty — but his aim is to help the latter group benefit from Feed-In Tarriffs too.

He said: “People need to relate to household energy use in the same way they do to fuel consumption in a car. Most people know how much a litre of petrol costs and have at least a rough idea of their car’s fuel consumption. This lets them work out how much a journey will cost.”

Not so with energy used at home.

He added: “Most energy consumers simply do not know how much they pay for their energy, do not check how much they are using, or understand how their bills are calculated.”

On the other hand, an Ebico survey found that most of us are what he calls “Weamers” — people who Waste Energy and Money at home.

The Ebico survey found that 60 per cent of households argue about energy wastage. The number one “weam” (40 per cent of energy arguments) is about leaving lights on, followed by leaving electronic appliances on standby (28 per cent) and having the heating turned up too high (27 per cent). And 78 per cent of those questioned said their home was occupied by at least one energy waster.

Mr Levermore said: “Collectively, our homes are the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in the UK, yet the changes we need to make to see big reductions in energy consumption are quite simple and easy.

“Just by turning the thermostat down by one degree can save you ten per cent on your annual energy bill.”

He himself has the thermostat in his 1930s house set at just 18 degrees.

With the cold wind of recession threatening again to engulf us all next winter, perhaps we should all learn to turn the heat down.

Already, apparently, many of have done so as the economic downturn bites.