Living Like Ed by Ed Jr. (whitelam books .txt) 📗

marketplace. In turn, that company offers you the chance to buy this power for your home.

This is something you can do in most places in the country. You can sign up to buy green power from Austin Energy, or from the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, or from the Eugene Water & Electric Board. You can get it from the Omaha Public Power District or the Iowa Association of Municipal Utilities or Colorado Springs Utilities. Many municipal and public utility companies across the country are offering these green power programs.

Even if your current utility company does not have this kind of program, your state may still allow retail electricity competition. If so, you can just take your business elsewhere and buy green power from another supplier that does offer the green option.

The good news is that these green programs are introducing new green power into the grid. It’s not a case of the companies trying to get credit for existing green energy sources—“Oh, we took title to a hydro-plant out in Idaho from 1937. We own it. See? We bought it!”—because then, what’s the new influence on the grid? That hydro-plant’s been cranking out green power for years.

What the LADWP green power program does is put new green power into the grid that we all use. The DWP purchases new wind turbine power. It purchases new geothermal power, new solar power—some kind of alternative power that is clean and green.

Now, there’s a little footnote to this: In my area there is an additional charge for taking part in this program.

Originally, the service was offered free to low-income customers; they could have green power for no charge. This enabled the DWP to say, “We have 100,000 homes signed up for this green power program!” They didn’t advertise the fact that it didn’t cost 50,000 of them a cent, but another 50,000 did sign up to pay an extra penny for every kilowatt of power.

Me, I pay an extra 3¢ per kilowatt-hour because I said, “Look, I heard this green power program is only 20 percent green. I want 100 percent green. Do you have such a program?” And they said, “We’ll get back to you.”

After a few days, they called back to say it would be a lot of money. I asked, “How much money?” They replied, 3¢ per kilowatt-hour more. Ooh! Three extra cents! I figured I’m using so little power anyway that the difference to my bill would be negligible, so I told them, “Fine. Charge me three cents extra a kilowatt-hour.”

Now, remember, I buy nearly all my power off-peak, and that off-peak power starts at less than 4¢ per kilowatt-hour. Even with the 3¢ I’m adding to it for the green power program and some other various charges, I’m still paying only 9¢ a kilowatt-hour, which is very cheap for power. (The average Joe or Jane in California is paying more than 12¢ per kilowatt-hour for the same power.)

So for what little power I use—the less than 10 percent of my consumption for this house, including Rachelle’s Pilates studio with the heat on for most of the winter and the air conditioner on for most of the summer, with my larger electric car, with my Begley’s Best business, with our daughter and laundry and all kinds of activities—it’s still only $600 a year worth of grid power, and all of it’s green power. It’s green as the solar on my roof. It’s just coming from elsewhere.

Paying It Back with TerraPass

You can also do something that’s very simple—that’s just as green and just as real. You can sign up for a carbon offset pass. In Chapter 2 I showed how purchasing these carbon offsets allows you to mitigate the pollution coming from your car and your air travel. Well, you can also mitigate it from your home energy use.

Let’s say they don’t offer a green power program in the town where you live. You can still have your own personal green power program because you’re buying real green power that’s really going into the grid from TerraPass or another company like it.

This carbon offset won’t stop the pollution being made where you live by the power plant that serves you, but somewhere in the country there’s real green power being put into the grid, and that green power offsets the carbon emissions from the power you’re actually using.

So how do you sign up? You go to the TerraPass website’s section on home energy use. They have a screen with different fields. “How much electricity do you use in a year?”

I have no idea. “Honey, give me the bill. Let’s see.”

You can give me a winter month and a summer month, and there’s a way to figure out how much energy you use in a year. I didn’t know this, but I use 1,200 kilowatt-hours a month. Who knew? I never knew this, but they asked me to get this information, so I did, and then I typed in “1,200 kilowatt-hours a month.”

Next they ask, “Where do you live?” They ask you a few questions.

Then they mitigate. They know by state, by region, the amount of natural gas and coal from your region that you’re probably going to use for your power consumption.

They put that into an equation and they say, for example, “For a TerraPass, we’re going to charge you $35 a year”—or $135 a year, depending on how much power you use and where you live.

So, as I mentioned in Chapter 2, there’re forty thousand people signed up with TerraPass now. What would happen if everybody did that? What if four million people signed up? What would happen then?

I’ll tell you what would happen. One by one, utility companies would say, “You know what? Let’s shut down that dirty power plant that we’re getting all those fines for that’s not cost effective to run anymore. We’ve got all these people signed up for TerraPass. They put up a whole state’s worth of green energy