100% Renewal energy for your home
09/11/18 08:22 Filed in: energy
There's pretty much 100% consensus among scientists world-wide that the combustion of fossil fuels by humans is raising global temperatures. That increased warming is causing a tremendous cascade of other effects — and virtually none of them are good… Closer to home, though, the problem we have is that WE NEED ENERGY, especially as we're moving into the colder months. Natural gas is a fairly clean and efficient energy source for our furnaces, fireplace inserts, and water heaters. Electricity keeps the lights on, and keeps the stuff in our refrigerators and freezers nice and cold, too. When it comes to that electricity, we do have an option for how that power is actually generated — even without getting solar panels installed on the house!
My wife and I were intrigued by the insert in one of our recent Portland General bills. There was a promo for PGE's Green Future program, which has several different options for the source of the electricity you use. One of those options was their Green Source program, where the electricity comes form a variety of renewal energy sources (e.g., wind, solar, geothermal, biomass and hydro). All of those sources in the Green Source program are 100% renewable and carbon-neutral (yeah, okay, the "biomass" source is where green waste gets burned to generate electricity, but that's a renewable source!).
So, the big question for most of us is, "what would that cost me?" The Green Source program is a tiny, little additional cost per kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity, just $0.008 (eight-tenths of one penny!) per kWh. PGE's web site says that the average increase for their residential customers would be about $6. I checked the usage history on our electric bills, and called PGE's customer service to verify what I thought the Green Source program would cost us. Folks, based on the electricity consumption that my wife and I have, it came out to about $1.50/month!
That's some piece of mind that we can easily afford, don't you think?
- Rob M.
My wife and I were intrigued by the insert in one of our recent Portland General bills. There was a promo for PGE's Green Future program, which has several different options for the source of the electricity you use. One of those options was their Green Source program, where the electricity comes form a variety of renewal energy sources (e.g., wind, solar, geothermal, biomass and hydro). All of those sources in the Green Source program are 100% renewable and carbon-neutral (yeah, okay, the "biomass" source is where green waste gets burned to generate electricity, but that's a renewable source!).
So, the big question for most of us is, "what would that cost me?" The Green Source program is a tiny, little additional cost per kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity, just $0.008 (eight-tenths of one penny!) per kWh. PGE's web site says that the average increase for their residential customers would be about $6. I checked the usage history on our electric bills, and called PGE's customer service to verify what I thought the Green Source program would cost us. Folks, based on the electricity consumption that my wife and I have, it came out to about $1.50/month!
That's some piece of mind that we can easily afford, don't you think?
- Rob M.
