The Green Miles Buys Green Power IV: The Bottom Line

OK, let's get some things out of the way first. I am not a scientist and I suck at math. I'm more with the hugging the trees and the writing the funny stories. I'm going to do the best I can here and if I screwed anything up, tell me and I'll fix it. If you do not agree with this disclaimer, please click here to be taken to a picture of a puppy sitting on a kitten.

So right now, I'm paying about $0.0596 per kilowatt hour (slightly more in summer, slightly less in winter) for Dominion's standard mix of dirty coal and nuclear power. According to Pepco's PowerChoice.com, here are my options:

Green Mix (hydro, solar, wind & biomass) -- $0.1018/kwh
Wind Only -- $0.1098/kwh

I decided to go with the Green Mix (my term) because it's a little cheaper and I'm not picky about whether it's zero-carb(on) or just almost-zero-carb.

How much will it cost me? In the past year, my roommate and I used 3,550 kilowatt hours of electricity. (Because my roommate and I live in a small apartment, aren't home very often, and only run the heat/air conditioning when we need it, we use relatively little power.) It's cost us $211 in direct payments for electricity supply service, and a little less than that for distribution service (about $10-40 per month for ESS plus $10-20 per month for DS).

Assuming our power usage stays the same, the Green Mix will increase our direct payments for ESS to $361 (closer to $15-60 per month) and our DS costs will go up as well ($15-30 per month). However, I've recently cut our power usage by 10% through power strips and compact fluorescent light bulbs, so the hit won't be that bad.

How much will it help the environment? Here's where the impacts get really remarkable. According to one carbon footprint calculator, here's how just switching my electricity source will alter my carbon footprint:

Total with mostly coal power: 6.3 tons of carbon dioxide emitted
Total with renewable energy: 4.75 tons of CO2 emitted

Just switching my electricity to renewable energy will keep over 3,000 pounds of CO2 out of the atmosphere every year. Add in my roommate's half of the bill, and it's up to 6,000 pounds of CO2, or three tons. It's about the same impact as cutting my driving 5,000 miles a year. Considering I started this whole process because I'm now driving more, it's nice to see a strong correlation there. (Speaking of driving, for a fun game go to the carbon calculator and see how much your carbon emissions go up if you switch your car to a 2006 Lincoln Navigator.)

The bottom line? Yes, it'll cost more. But for me, it's a far more convenient way to slash my carbon footprint than selling my car. I already work out of our DC office one day a week and carpool one or two days a week, but taking public transportation from Ballston to Reston the remaining days would be a major pain -- it takes at least twice as long as driving.

But what's most critical is that the benefits I'm buying aren't theoretical or hippie mumbo-jumbo. Switching your power to renewable energy has a clear cause-and-effect impact -- less coal is burned resulting in a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. As the Washington Post details today, if you rely on carbon offsets, the results are much less clear:

A closer look reveals an unregulated market in which some improvements bought by customers are only estimated, extrapolated, hoped-for or nil. Some offsets support projects that would have gone forward anyway. Others deliver results difficult to measure.

Switching to renewable energy, on the other hand, will get a huge bang for my buck -- even more than if I'd switched my car to a new Toyota Prius (that would cut 1.3 tons of CO2 off my annual carbon footprint and cost a lot more than a couple of hundred dollars).

Check it out for yourself at Pepco's website.

Monday -- The Green Miles Buys Green Power I: The Adventure Begins
Tuesday -- The Green Miles Buys Green Power II: Even Dominion Workers Think Dominion's Process Sucks
Wednesday -- The Green Miles Buys Green Power III: Convincing Pepco to Take My Money
Thursday -- The Green Miles Buys Green Power IV: The Bottom Line

The Green Miles Buys Green Power III: Convincing Pepco to Take My Money

As I detailed earlier this week, Dominion Virginia Power won't sell me renewable energy directly and their system for buying it through a third party is really convoluted.

The nice Dominion lady I talked to recommended going straight to the Virginia Energy Choice website to check out my energy options directly. I clicked through a couple of the power providers and it seemed like Pepco was my best bet. I say "best" meaning "willing to charge me twice as much as I pay now but at least they'll sell me renewable energy at all."

However, I was reluctant to start forking over twice as much for power considering what little detail the Pepco website offered. Would they bill me directly through Dominion? Would the twice-as-much be on top of what Dominion charged me, or would that replace what Dominion charged me? The website offered few answers.

I tried calling Pepco. But as I'm sure you've experienced with what passes for customer service these days, I was shunted off to various automated answer lines. Finally I got an operator and said, "I'm a residential customer in Virginia who wants to buy renewable energy through Pepco." Surely such a direct plea to give them my money would result in action!

So she transferred me to voicemail. In fact, I left two voicemails that day saying I wanted to buy renewable energy from Pepco, but didn't hear back. Finally I told the operator of my plight and she said, "Oh, the person who handles that is off today."

Renewable energy in Virginia is such a priority for power companies, there's a total of one person assigned to it. And you wonder why I keep calling for the federal government to set a strong national renewable energy standard.

The next week I traded voicemails with a customer service agent. And the week after that. It took me about a month to finally connect. She confirmed that Pepco would bill me directly through Dominion, meaning I would still only get one power bill. This is how the third party system works:

- I tell Pepco I want to buy renewable energy
- Dominion tells Pepco how much energy I've used in a given month, and buys that much renewable power from Pepco
- Dominion bills me for what Pepco charged them

According to Pepco's PowerChoice.com, here are my options:

Green mix (hydro, solar, wind and biomass) -- $0.1018/kilowatt hour
Wind only -- $0.1098/kilowatt hour

So how would switching to those options impact my power bill? Tomorrow we will, in the words of the immortal MC Hammer ... break it down.

Monday -- The Green Miles Buys Green Power I: The Adventure Begins
Tuesday -- The Green Miles Buys Green Power II: Even Dominion Workers Think Dominion's Process Sucks
Wednesday -- The Green Miles Buys Green Power III: Convincing Pepco to Take My Money
Thursday -- The Green Miles Buys Green Power IV: The Bottom Line