A very patient phone rep explained it to me. It’s better than just buying a carbon offset: for the amount I contribute the power company does indeed increase the renewable energy in their electricity mix. (The New Yorker in me is skeptical of this, but I’m rolling with it.) Does this change the source of electricity coming into the house? Not directly: it’s not like we’re hooked up to a separate green utility pole with cleaner electricity just for us. (Hey, I can dream.) But it does mean I’m paying for clean energy in my portion of the overall pool. Instead of fossil fuels, my portion comes from the wind and solar sources included in the above graphic.I had the option of purchasing a 300 kWh block each month, paying per/kWh for 50% of our power usage, or paying per kWh for 100% of our power. I may regret this in the summer when the A/C sends our bills way up, but I opted for 100%.
Color me green!
5 comments:
You go, girl!
Jen R.
We just switched over to 100%, too, but I wasn't entirely sure how it worked. Thanks for breaking it down. And way to go!
Congrats, Emily! I was pleased it was so affordable -- one cent/kWh isn't going to add much to our bill. It's so reasonable -- I hope we can encourage lots of others to do the same :-)
Thank, Jen, for pointing me to your explanation - ti helps a lot.
How, by the way, do you embed links into comments? Do you have to use the raw html?
Cheers,
RFSJ
Hi, RFSJ -
How nice to have you visiting today! Did you see I plugged you on Sunday :-)
Re: the embedded comments, yes, I just hand-formatted the link in raw HTML. It shows up as code in the composition window, but when I clicked "preview" it formatted as a link: success!
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