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Is your home powered by clean energy?

#Poll #EvanPoll

  • Strong yes (17%, 92 votes)
  • Qualified yes (35%, 188 votes)
  • Qualified no (25%, 134 votes)
  • Strong no (21%, 112 votes)
526 voters. Poll end: 1 year ago

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🤷🏼

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I’m tempted to make not knowing a qualified no since it sort of indicates I’m not doing anything to ensure that, but also I’m not really sure what I could do other than maybe vote for the people I already vote for?
@jph if you don't know, it's probably no. Qualified no would be more honest, since you're not sure.
@jph

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pretty sure we get a fair amount of hydro here but a fair amount of gas as well. We have a few recent solar installations but I’m unclear on how exactly they sell their power

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> I'm not really sure what I could do other than maybe vote for the people I already vote for?

If you have the choice of several suppliers, then switching to the cleanest one may be an option. Where I live, Greenpeace has a ranking. I switched from a provider who had a 6/20 score to one who has a 19/20 score. And this summer one of the coops who have a 20/20 score should open up for contracts again. This may ocf not be an option for everyone.

I still chose Qualified Yes, though. I'm not sure if in this day and age a Strong Yes is something that really exists.
@ilja yea I suppose it was kind of my point that the options are basically the one company, don’t pay my electric bill, or move. I know some people who have their own solar panels but that’s not really an option in my building either 🤷🏼
@ilja the website wasn’t working last night but I was able to get in this morning. Reading the fine print on my bill I was eventually able to find a breakdown of the sourcing. Less hydro in there than I expected but more solar and wind. A lot more nuclear than I expected. Picking qualified yes since renewables are >%10.

Seems I do have supplier options but it’s… unclear how it works.

Guess I have some reading to do.
how green is hydroelectricity?

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@laprice depends upon the project and what your accounting for in your lifecycle analysis. Here in the northeast we are getting alot of our power from Quebec. There are real social, political and colonial concerns:

I think that it is considered a critical path for carbon emission reduction, behind only wind and nuclear:

IPCC chapter on the topic:

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/Chapter-5-Hydropower-1.pdf
Hate the term “clean energy.” Makes it sound like it removes all trade-offs instead of relocating them.

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@mjgardner yeah going through my options from an earlier thread and it seems the best I can do is get the same sources but they buy green energy offsets to pad the percentage. One of them does it for the same price as the standard rate so I guess it wouldn’t hurt but I certainly don’t feel great about the shell game.
at least partially. I believe the default choice for power in Berkeley is either mostly or fully renewable.

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Qualified yes, because I pay a significant premium to a co-op that promises 100% renewable electricity from Pennsylvania, and "renewable" methane captured from rotting waste: https://www.theenergy.coop/

But these renewables do not directly power my house. They go into a grid where all separation is lost. Some of the electrons coming out of my wall surely come from fossil fuels, my money has no direct effect.

I hope to plan renovations that would directly use renewables instead.

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@skyfaller I can’t believe that I hadn’t thought of this. (But ignorance truly is bliss.) I think I’ll continue to imagine that the electricity from renewable sources that I pay extra for is lovingly delivered to my home by green elves.
Qualified yes because I buy my power from a company who markets it as 100% renewable energy. Qualified because I know that there’s only one grid, and most of the base load is still coal powered in Australia, so there’s bound to be some offsetting shenanigans going on to make that happen. Still with what little purchasing power I have I will do what I can to create the incentives.

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Not especially. We looked into it, but the company that offered "environmentally responsible" electricity also required you to have an excellent credit rating and we didn't qualify.

I frankly have some resentment about that kind of thinking and what it says about the sincerity of such companies.

But OTOH, much of the power in this area is nuclear and wind, anyway, rather than fossil fuel.

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public utility district using mostly natural gas turbines, some hydroelectric and a little wind for generation. Hoping for the Airiva windwall to go into production soon. https://airiva.com/

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I pay for 100% renewable energy, but it's still delivered by PG&E, and nothing that they collect revenue on can really be called "clean"...

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depends what rhe grid is supplying but yes most of the time.

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Bounced between qualified yes and qualified no because the answer depends on whether "powered by" is interpreted as "completely powered by". I feel like in this context "partially" is a useful answer

In my case: a nontrivial part of NJ's power mix seems to come from nuclear, though it's still majority gas-powered. Plan to look into ways of improving this for my own usage soon but I've only just moved so don't know the local options here yet

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@jfred I ended up qualified yes for partial. I think the results would probably be more lopsided if it was 100%
in my area of north carolina about 8% of the energy mix is solarr

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I think the biggest way homeowners can be green is to make sure their homes are energy efficient. Windows, doors and energy efficient heating and cooling, appliances. I’ve been offered “clean energy” at a premium but consider it a marketing ploy more than anything concrete. If I pay for the clean version, what makes my power different than what my neighbor gets. Seems scammy. Strong no on this, even though I buy power from a co-op that says it comes from Niagara Falls.

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went with strong yes, since we're running off our rootftop solar and pay for 100% of our energy from Green Mountain Power with their renewable energy rider -- aka, they buy RECs to offset non-renewable energy in their mix.

If you are grid attached, which I think is the best approach, you are going to have to rely upon accounting with REC purchases to get "clean".

It is a foundational truth, IMO, that this is a social system issue, and not an individual consumer issue. I do what i do to make the whole grid more reliable and to add more renewables to the mix for me and my neighbors -- not to clear my conscience.

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Working on it. (Although Ontario's grid is only 90% clean. And I can't really do my own solar...)

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50% solar power!

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solar panels and a propane tank. Working on minimizing the latter, to remove completely when practical

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I wish it were, but it’s not.

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I assume "Strong no" means we put extra coal in the oven even though it's already hot enough.

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Mostly nuclear, so I don't know how to answer this poll 😅

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I'm in France, so nuclear power here! I can’t remember if it's considered clean nowadays. 😉

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Puh. Tough one. Electricity wise I do have a 100% renewables contract, but that doesn’t mean the electricity arriving via the grid is 100% clean. And the central heating of all 6 apartments in our house runs on natural gas. So I voted qualified no but that is a misleading answer.

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Nuclear, can I get a ruling?

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there’s only one electricity provider and half of the plants are hydro- and other half are thermal, so i guess that counts as yes. there’s apparently some few wind plants too, but they’re too far away it’s unlikely i get energy from there
@evan:
Just yesterday my yearly report came in, contains a souce breakdown of the year prior.
Did not know it was 100% wind, third column.
we had solar at the last place, but the roof here is shaded by very old sugar maples so we can't.

I want the panels back though. On top of guaranteed green, eversource is price gouging the shit out of us

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qualified yes: on the one hand, we're using an electricity company that sells only locally generated wind/solar power. We also have enough solar panels to cover our total yearly usage (but not at all times, e.g. during winter etc.). But: we use natural gas for heating. It is sold by the company as "forest-compensated" but that doesn't make it less of a fossil fuel of course.
so hard to know. Our supplier claims 100% renewable, but some of that comes from offsetting which is hard to think of as truly renewable.
our power comes from a 125-year old run-of-river hydro generator that's been operating continuously since it was apocryphally installed by Nikolai Tesla himself. We've considered installing solar, but it would massively increase the embodied carbon footprint of our electric supply. 😅
I live within 4km of four dams with a total generation capacity of over 200MW. As soon as the one closest is refurbished, we'll be ❤00m, one underwater cable and two hydro poles from the point of generation. This was a deliberate choice.
Qualified yes: I produce about 75-85% of my electricity myself with rooftop solar. Of the remaining g power I get from the grid, only about 25% is renewable currently. My home heat is still propane and wood, but I’ll be installing an air-source heat pump system, I hope this year. And then I need to at least double my solar collection capacity to cover the heat pump and EV chargers.
Qualified Yes.

My electric coop has renewable energy rider. For a very small amount of money a month, they must allocate sufficient renewable sources to cover my usage (as well as everyone else who adds the rider).

Cost of the rider is $0.000430 per kWh.

You read the correctly. Under a buck a month. It’s 0.4% (approx) of my bill as I pay approximately $0.10 per kWh

And yet when I told my neighbors about this, nobody responded positively. #Texas
Puerto Rico's power grid is almost entirely petroleum-fired. We do have a little hydroelectric, plus a wind farm in Santa Isabela, but that's it.
Qualified because I pay extra for the power company to send money to a wind farm in proportion to the number of electrons I consume, but I'm not going to pretend that the electrons in the wires coming to my house are tagged with where they came from.
Qualified yes; Ontario's power is mostly nuclear (not "clean", but not carbon), then proper clean/renewable (the colloquial term for mains electricity here is "hydro"), and we backfill with a bit of brown energy at peak times.
In BC, a high proportion of electricity is generated hydroelectrically so if you can disconnect the gas the story becomes imperfect but good. But also more expensive, not just the capital cost of a heat pump and induction stove and car charger etc but the monthly cost to heat and light and cook and drive. The latter represents a policy failure.
the electricity, on average: yes. Could be worse, can be better
We buy 100% renewable (at barely a premium, in fact); however, the nature of grid offsets means that somewhere, someone might have their thumb on the scale and give that good ol' dirty energy a new place to go where nobody's looking.
Qualified yes as we have solar panels, but they’re only able to produce about 50-60% of our electricity needs on a good day (e.g. height of summer). We’re hoping to double our number of panels over the next several years, but we still prob couldn’t produce enough in the winter.
We're with Octopus in the UK who supply renewable energy. Of course that is hard to verify myself, but they must get audited. We plan to have PV panels fitted soon with a battery.
I went with qualified yes: we have solar panels that deliver 80-95% of our annual net usage, but in winter, more than 50% of our grid supply is from natural gas. Even if we pay our local generating company for 100% renewable.
We decided to get solar & backup battery power after winter storm Uri, which further broke our already broken power grid here in Texas. We consider it an expensive insurance policy against being without power again for 40+ hours, and it worked just last week when our neighborhood lost power dozens of times during the ice storm here in central Texas.

We never lost power. There was no sun during the worst of it, so thankfully the grid power mostly stayed on during that time...
Seattle City Light removed the last of coal fired generating from their mix in 2018, now 100% emissions free with predominantly hydro electric.

I also have 8.1kWh grid tied PV on my roof since 2014, but no storage yet.
Officially clean. But it's a lie. It is simply not possible.
Yup, by local wind power. That electricity powers a geothermal heat pump that heats the house.
Mostly no but strongly yes in a couple of weeks.
i dont know, it is attached to national power grid. They claim it is from hydroelectric and maybe even wind turbines.
hard nope.

I live in Calgary, Alberta, energy capital of Canada. Thing is, most of my neighbours haven't quite figured out this whole new clean energy thing yet. :blobfoxcofeglare:
yes. but it's a drop in the ocean according to this map https://app.electricitymaps.com/map
Yes to electricity, that cames from a solar energy coop. But in winter we use gas to warm us. 😞

Saving to aerotermia and wall isolation to decrease our consume.
We’ve been using Arcadia for around ten years now I think. So while we might not exactly have clean energy coming directly into our home via roof top solar, this is supposed to guarantee that all of our energy consumption Is matched to clean wind energy production for a small premium.

It all seemed legit and authentic to me. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable doesn’t tell me I’ve just been getting scammed for years now.
Solar panels for electricity, natural gas for heat 😢, ICE cars😢 😢. Would love to upgrade to Heat Pump and EVs, but with a kid in college it’s not currently in the budget.
Electric we get through Peninsula Clean Energy (ECO100 the 100% renewable option) - https://www.peninsulacleanenergy.com/

But natural gas... no choice really there.
in portland you can tell PGE you only want green energy going to your house
same mix as any other Ontario home. Lot nuclear. Bit of hydro. Bit of natural gas. Cleanish.
not yet, but we just got our first bid for going solar with a battery. Next we'll replace our two things that still use gas (about half our bill): central heater and water heater.

PG&E is dirty, unreliable, increasingly expensive, and callously unsafe.
This was a pretty hard poll. First, a lot of people feeling personally challenged, which wasn't the intention of the poll.

Second, a lot of discussion of what qualifies as "clean energy" or if that's even a worthwhile term.

For me, qualified yes. I'm in Quebec, which is almost entirely on hydroelectric power. That's low emissions, but some serious environmental impact.

I also burn wood for heat once or twice a week, which is renewable but not particularly clean.
I wanted to be a wiseass and say "it's rented so technically it's not MY home" :blobcat3c: , but voted anyway.
@yuki2501 do you have to own the building for it to be your home?
No, but to install solar heaters, yes.

Landlords suck 😕
it did get me to investigate my local power company a bit more than I ever really thought to. I don’t really like what I found but, I found stuff

Mostly pdf files
now you’re reminding me that solar energy is really hard to make renewable. I don’t think stellar transposition is really a viable strategy when we our star burns out, do you?
living in Ireland our electricity is 100% renewable (mostly wind) but we do have oil central heating (kerosene) soo I guess it’s a no to being totally clean.
South Africa and unable to get solar for my apartment. There is one nuclear station in the country but the vast majority of our energy comes from coal and diesel.
I am trying. My next our purchase will be solar panels.