Monday, August 13, 2007

The Green Miles Buys Green Power I: The Adventure Begins

I've already used a Remo Williams reference to begin a recurring segment:

For those of you who enjoy bad movies, the title of this blog refers to the disastrous Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins, which killed several careers and left Joel Grey seriously wounded. My favorite part was Remo spending the entire movie strengthening his fingers so he could spend two seconds breaking this dude's gas mask. You also have to love that they were so confident the movie would spawn sequels they titled it The Adventure Begins. And if all that doesn't get you, there's the twirling.
But since that "The Adventure Begins" thing never fails to crack me up, I may make using that to open a recurring segment a recurring segment in itself. Now that that's settled, let's move on.

I've been tinkering around with the idea of switching my apartment over to green power for about a year now. I'm reminded of it every time I visit my dad in Quincy, MA, who has a great view of this beautiful wind power station outside Boston.

The problem is, Dominion Virginia Power doesn't make it easy.

Dominion actually does not offer renewable energy in Virginia. You have to use their energy choice program to buy from an outside vendor, who will then deliver your monthly power usage worth of green power to Dominion's grid.

Last year I tried to start the process by filling out the Renewable Energy Contact Form. That form will send email notices to all suppliers of green power in Virginia, letting them know you're interested in purchasing from them.

So what response did I get last year? Nothing. Unless you count the one away message I got saying that one company's representative was away through the 4th of July.

I gave up on buying renewable energy at that point. But after recently deciding I shouldn't sell my car, I wanted to do something more to reduce my carbon footprint (calculate yours here).

I decided to give it another shot, and it was even more frustrating than my last experience with Dominion on green power. But this time, I wasn't taking no for an answer.

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

1 comment:

  1. So, you may address this in a later post, but ... I started to convert to green power about 9 months ago - problem was it was crazy expensive (at least through Pepco). Not that I mind spending money to be greener, but in the end I decided it was better to save some money towards buying a more energy efficient AC than the clunky thing from 1975 that I have now that eats up energy.

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