Green electricity option DC/MD/VA

If you live in Virginia, Maryland, or the District of Columbia, it appears that you can choose to purchase your electricity from a "green" power provider. This does not seem to be advertised much, so I thought I might post it here.

Choosing to buy from a green provider will raise your electric bill by perhaps 40 to 50 percent. For me, the cost is on the order of a dollar a day, to have (in principle) my electricity come from wind farms in the Mid-Atlantic region. There's also a slightly cheaper option to buy electricity made with methane from the Lorton landfill. You have to agree to sign up for a year.

I only signed up yesterday -- customer #600, which tells me that this option hasn't been chosen much. I have yet to see whether or not there wil be any snags in the process. But at face value, it appears incredibly easy to sign up. Click the boxes, type in the data, have your current electric bill handy for the account number. The internet site is:

EDIT: Fixed bad link
http://www.powerchoice.com/ProductsAndServ...ode=Residential


I do not profess to understand much about this. In fact, I proved that I didn't understand much in a series of posts here yesterday. But I believe that the net effect is, in effect, that I now purchase carbon-free wind power for my house. In fact, of course, I use what the grid provides me. But my dollars now will go to purchase from a consortium of mid-Atlanic wind farms, which, in principle, means an offetting reduction in electricity created from Va Power's own plants. So my action has resulted in an incremental cleaning-up of the local power grid, in proportion to my electrical spending as a fraction of total electrical demand. I believe. That's bordering on a faith-based approach to electricity, but I think I did the right thing environmentally.

This action was prompted by a post by SSimon, in a thread regarding "green tags" and Terrapass. For those of you in the know, the relevant Federal website says PEPCO actually buys the electricity from these wind farms, not just their "renewable energy certificates". That's also how PEPCO describes it.

I'm not urging people to sign up, I'm just letting people know the choice is available. I didn't know until SSimon's post prompted me to find out. I understand VA Power burying this -- you can't expect them to advertise a competitor's product -- but either I ignored it or PEPCO didn't advertise this option much.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(tripp @ Jan 14 2007, 09:15 PM) [snapback]375655[/snapback]</div>

I've had a hard time absorbing that a) I can do this and b) few people have done this.

This is an incredibly radical change. I've been thinking on and off for years about (e.g.) putting in a PV array. What'll it cost, would I have to take down any trees, can my truss roof take the weight, blah blah blah. But this means I no longer have to produce it myself to have clean electricity. I don't need to put in a PV array now -- I just bought clean energy.

So, instead of having to have some effort, brains, investment, commitment -- that's no longer required. The only skill I need to have is the ability to shop on the internet. I think that opens this up to a vastly wider audience.

It still requires a bit of faith and understanding. Mostly, the the faith part is that as long as my dollars cause clean electricity to be substituted for fossil-fuel-fired electricity, then I have faith that the net impact on the environment is as if I were literally consuming that clean electricity myself.

Consider all those people in California, thinking about installing one-off, do-it-yourself PV systems, under the million solar roofs initiative. Well, if what I just did works, then that's immediately an antique, obsolete way of doing business (unless you really dig the fact that you generate your own, which I totallly understand, but is not on point for a discussio of environmental impact). It's noble, it's moving toward cleaner electricity, but it's fundamentally a really, really inefficent way to get more PV power into the California grid. Why not have a pro build you a great big efficient PV array out in the desert, and just buy clean electric from a pro? It would have to be cheaper to do it that way. You'd get economies of scale, you'd have a pro there to fix anything if it broke, location and orientation would be optimized, you'd need just one interface with the grid instead of a million separate ones, and so on. Offer a green energy option via the electric company, take the $2B subsidy that's going to be spent on rooftop solar panels and instead offer it in some way to individuals wishing to opt for green energy as I just did, and ... you're done. No multi-year wait, no cumbersome system of inspection and certification. Buy your power from the pros who know how to make it, cleanly.

OK, so the argument is not as clean as all that. You're getting people to invest their own money to do it, and you're locking in the commitment and the technology for the next 20 years. And probably other issues I haven't thought up. But I still say that, for that amount of money, a purely financial arrangement to purchase clean power would be vastly more efficient that actually, physicially producing green power via individual homeowner power generating setups.

I mean, I don't sew my own clothes, pump my own water, grown my own food. Does it really make sense for me to generate my own clean electricity? Not if I can buy it at a reasonable price.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Skwyre7 @ Jan 15 2007, 08:31 AM) [snapback]375785[/snapback]</div>

Good.

I'll point out something that confused me at first. You pay about $0.10 per KWH for your electric, but that's electricty + distribution. It's about 6c for electric, about 4c for distribution. The offer from the green provider is the electricity amount only. You'll still pay the 4c distribution charge. Your electric bill has a line on it where it says, "this is the price to use when comparing other offers" -- that'll say 6cents, more or less.

So, my total cost will go from $0.10 (6c for generic electricity + 4c for distribution) to about $0.15 (11c for green elecric plus 4c for distribution).

Only other caveat is that I can't believe this really is this easy to do. I'll post again if there's a snag.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Eric Nothman @ Jan 15 2007, 01:25 PM) [snapback]375917[/snapback]</div>

Excellent, thanks for the post. Oddly, that seems to be available in some Virginia Power localities, per VA Power, but it is not available to me, based on my ZIP code. But it is available to PEPCO, BGE, Delmarva, Allegheny customers. So, PEPCO customers, this is a better deal than I got -- from PEPCO. At that price, why not? That's on the order of 50cents a day at my usage rate. Call it one Starbucks coffee per week.

And that's what I don't get. At that price, who wouldn't buy this if a) they weren't dirt poor, b) they cared about climate change, and c) they knew about it. I think c) is the limiting factor here. Tripp says in CO they are so oversubscribed it's rationed. Here, I am subscriber #600 for the Pepco plan. In a wealthy, yuppie area like the DC 'burbs? No way. Understanding you MD customers have a better deal available, I don't believe there are only 600 families in No VA who'd be willing to pay for this.

I think people just don't know about it. My wife and I are planning to talk this up everywhere we can.

Now I'm sitting here wondering if I got the best deal I could. I have to tell you, I couldn't make head or tail out of the Va Power website. Nope, did it systematically this time, and PEPCO appears to be the only clean energy choice I have. Looks like Maryland is some years ahead of VA in this game. All of your options are cheaper than mine. I'm still grateful to have an option.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(livelychick @ Jan 15 2007, 03:59 PM) [snapback]375992[/snapback]</div>

Good, maybe we'll start a trend.