(no subject)

[inahandbasket]

I'm a bit of a green energy freak, I've tried to keep it quiet though. (What would the neighbors think?) I suspect that since we own our own place and I now have the ability to affect such changes, I'll be a lot less quiet on that front in the future, just fyi. If you want to opt-out of such lefty communist rantings just let me know and I'll make a filter for it.

I just signed up for NStar electric and gas service at the new house (!) and noticed that they have a full 100% wind power option available for only 1.5 cents per kwh over their standard service. ($.14/kwh instead of $.125). Total no brainer in my mind.
If you're an NStar customer with an account in good standing you can have them switch you over to full wind power. Clicky.

Step one towards full eco-friendly housing complete.
(And in 4 years when our water heater needs replacing we're totally getting an on-demand heater, but that'll be another post.)

Comments

[miss-chance.livejournal.com]

I'm confused about the economics of this wind power option. I want to believe this is a good thing, because if it is, then no-brainer, sign me up! But I feel like I need more information. I'm hoping that since you're a self-pronounced green energy freak :) you might be able to clarify some things that are nagging on my mind about this, so I can get psyched about it, too.

It looks from the website as if NStar is buying power from two wind generating plants out of state. The critical part of me wants to know if they would be buying power from these additional suppliers anyway. Does NStar actually change how much of their own power they generate by coal and nukes based on how many people sign up for this? Does NStar operate in the markets where this power is generated in upstate NY and Maine? (and if not, is there a lossyness of energy transmission that has to be considered?) I find myself wondering if they might be buying this power anyway, and this could be an opportunity to do an end-run around regulatory measures regarding power rates by having ecologically minded people support their business-as-usual by paying a premium for something that they are doing by necessity anyway?

One thing I don't know is how variable the power-generation system is. At some point I had come to believe they were operating at or near capacity, at least in the summers (hence the rolling black-outs in densely populated areas). If this is the case, it would seem to me that if no one, or if thousands of people, sign up to pay extra for wind-power, they might still be buying it from other suppliers either way.

Perhaps they might be buying from other coal and nuke plants and are using this as a metric to determine public support for (plausibly more expensive) wind power and give them customer-counts to wave in front of legislature when looking for permission to build new wind plants? If it has use for the latter, it would still have some monetary value in my book, and might be an efficient way to fund regulatory support for wind power.

Tell me more?

[inahandbasket]

This article has a decent writeup on it...
http://www.bostonherald.com/business/general/view.bg?articleid=1103877

To some extent the entire electrical grid is a bit of a shell game. There's no way to guarantee the origin of your electrons as the entire thing across the country is tied together. Power generators (coal/nuke/wind/solar/wave/hamster) tap into the grid lines not very differently than your house does, but they're pushing into the grid instead of pulling. If you install solar panels on your roof and tie into the grid, you can actually push into it as well (depending on the setup) just as if you were a miniature 3-mile island. So even if you're paying for coal power, some of your electrons might be coming from your neighbor with the solar panels on the roof.

What you're doing by paying a bit extra for wind is mostly supporting their choice by subsidizing the increased distribution and implementation costs (wind is actually still slightly more costly than coal, mostly due to the cost of implementing new technologies versus old established ones (explained a bit here)), and also giving them customer counts to wave for the legislature for future additions to the grid.