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?
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
> 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.
@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:
@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.
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.
@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.
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.
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/
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
Peninsula Clean Energy was launched collaboratively by the County of San Mateo and all twenty of its cities. Our goal is to provide electricity that is 100% greenhouse gas free by 2021 and 100% renewable on a 24/7 basis by 2025.
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.
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.
jph
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jph
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jph
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ilja :pumpkin_owo:
•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.
jph
•jph
•Seems I do have supplier options but it’s… unclear how it works.
Guess I have some reading to do.
Accept purpose.
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Craig Brozefsky 🇵🇸
•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
Mark Gardner
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jph
•James M.
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Nelson Chu Pavlosky
•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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Peter Oram
•Andrew Feeney
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Space Catitude 🚀
•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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Joseph A di Paolantonio
•AIRIVA
AIRIVAEvan Prodromou reshared this.
James Brown
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Potato ENTHUSIAST
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Jonathan Frederickson
•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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jph
•Steve Holmes
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Lance
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Craig Brozefsky 🇵🇸
•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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Darcy Casselman
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Stefan
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whence and wherefore
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aaron
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penryu
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Emmanuel Wald
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Benoît Huron
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Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:
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JR
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🚲 (glitchy)
•Joël de Bruijn
•Just yesterday my yearly report came in, contains a souce breakdown of the year prior.
Did not know it was 100% wind, third column.
excited for the mastodon rise
•I want the panels back though. On top of guaranteed green, eversource is price gouging the shit out of us
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Ruben Verweij
•Doug Winter
•blaine
•Alan Langford
•Brian Hawthorne
•Bill Plein🌶
•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
Michael Roberts
•aburka 🫣
•Eddie Roosenmaallen
•Tim Bray
•Loy
•Mx. Aria Stewart
•Derek P. Collins
•Steve
•Christopher Neugebauer
•Bo Elder
•We never lost power. There was no sun during the worst of it, so thankfully the grid power mostly stayed on during that time...
Danny the Weary
•I also have 8.1kWh grid tied PV on my roof since 2014, but no storage yet.
morph
•JTLeskinen
•Eric G.
•Evan Prodromou
•التنينوكس
•Vincent St. Pierre :mw:
•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.
marzuq märzenbecher
•Live 24/7 CO₂ emissions of electricity consumption
app.electricitymaps.comAurora ✅
•Saving to aerotermia and wall isolation to decrease our consume.
finner
•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.
Jason Noffsinger
•Gabe Wachob 🐵🐴👨💻👨🎤🐮
•But natural gas... no choice really there.
Peninsula Clean Energy
PCE (Peninsula Clean Energy)All in 🥥🌴
•John Francis
•John Carlsen
•PG&E is dirty, unreliable, increasingly expensive, and callously unsafe.
Evan Prodromou
•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.
Cyber Yuki
•Evan Prodromou
•Cyber Yuki
•Landlords suck 😕
jph
•Mostly pdf files
: j@fabrica:~/src; :t_blink:
•River James
•trenchworms
•Thomas Lee ✅ :patreon:
•