Do you get your electricity from renewable sources?
 

When I moved into my house, I put us on our electric provider's "Energy For Tomorrow" plan. This plan says that I pay X amount ($0.014 per kWh) more and that all the electricity I use is generated by renewable sources. I know other electric companies have similar plans and I was wondering if anyone else here is using those plans?

Its nice knowing that even if I don't drastically drop my electric useage, I'm still doing what I can to not be a part of the problem. That, with the idea of converting more things to electric (like my mower), makes it all the better.

I wonder if my service provider has something along these lines. How did you find out about that program? When we bought our house I just called the list of places and said that I had to transfer the account into my name on May 5, 2008, so I didn't get good exposure to each company or what they had to offer.

Of course the hard part for me is trusting a company to do what they claim.

Well, I had heard about the program before. But, I'd recommend going to your provider's website and seeing if they have something explaining the program there. I know Ben Nelson (we live fairly close) is on a similar program but has a different provider and his plan works a bit differently than mine.

I had to say "some" as 15% is hydro and 5% is renewable in France. The rest is nuclear, ie non renewable.

Happily my solar panels should be on grid in a few weeks :) This will generate a quarter of my consumption (heating included) but will lower my CO2 impact only by 18% because in winter more CO2 is generated to generate electricity needed by heating : 71.5 g/kWh vs 60 g/kWh in summer.

It's very recent in France to have several energy providers. Some say they are greener than the historical provider, but they are only marginally greener. Some have compensation programs, noticeably for gas.

Denis.

I voted some. A bit of hydro and a bit of wind but mostly coal. My electric company offers a Greenpower program where I can voluntarily choose to pay an extra $2.50 per month per 100KWh block. However, I can't figure out what it is supposed to accomplish. Water is going to continually fall over the dam and the wind will pretty much blow whenever it wants to. Since the infrastructure is already built and it takes a very long lead time to replace, coal has to provide the remainder. It should have some effect on the power company's bottom line, so I guess it does have the benefit of reducing or delaying rate increases for non green power customers. If I had a choice of electricity suppliers, I would definitely be tempted to go with a green producer.

I'm not sure if our power co. offers something along these lines, but I have the same worry as cmittle.

My local coal-powered source is so cheap, it doesn't make personal sense for me to change. Any renewable provider, even a partial one, would cost me about double what I pay now.

About 20 years ago, one of the largest providers in the area advertised something similar to this. They said that if the majority of their customers agreed to a price hike, they would in turn take the extra money and build a hydroelectric facility on one of the main rivers here. Most did agree because also mentioned was the fact that once the dam was built, power costs would drop across the board.

Well, the dam got built and worked great but power costs never dropped. One year later the facility was shut down for no reason.

I will never agree to a voluntary price hike no matter where they "say" the power is coming from. They lie and the powers that be protect them when they do. I figure if they want to go green, they'll do it. They can do it now by their own hand or they can do it later as they're forced to by govt regulation.

Bullfrog power (Ontario & Alberta) guarantees that all money goes to renewable power producers (annual audit by a well known accounting firm).

As their customer base has increased, the result has been more renewables coming online.

I think the majority is wind power via SCE, and whatever that doesn't cover is from the LADWP. SCE is cheaper btw, since the farms sell to SCE for ~6c/kWh... :D