Blog Update!
For those of you not following me on Facebook, as of the Summer of 2019 I've moved to Central WA, to a tiny mountain town of less than 1,000 people.

I will be covering my exploits here in the Cascades, as I try to further reduce my impact on the environment. With the same attitude, just at a higher altitude!

Monday, April 2, 2007

Green energy

Seattle City Light (our local electricity provider) has a program called Green Up where you can buy your electricity from renewable energy sources. You can purchase your annual electricity usage at 25%, 50% or 100% levels (e.g. the 100% level means that 100% of your power comes from renewable energy sources).

Diablo Dam on the Skagit RiverWe already get about 87% of our electricity from clean hydroelectric power (except for that whole dam thing, it's a great source of energy), but the rest can now be supplied from other alternative energy sources such as the Stateline Wind Project in Eastern WA. It is the largest single wind farm in the U.S.

Stateline Wind ProjectI know there are drawbacks to both hydroelectric and wind farm generated energy, but it's better than the nuclear, natural gas and coal mix we currently get.

Anyway, we were contemplating investing in solar panels for the house, but since we can now purchase 100% of our electricity from renewable energy sources, we might just put that on hold.

Sign me up!

2 comments:

QT said...

I really like these programs. Our state (WI) also does methane capture, and will completely eliminate coal burning at a large facility by 2011, having replaced it entirely with methane. We also have a large windfarm nearby in Iowa that produces a significant amount of renewable energy.

Crunchy Chicken said...

I'll bet that most areas have these sorts of programs, it's just that most people don't know about them. Or they think it's way more expensive to choose alternative energy.

Hopefully these programs will become more popular as people become more aware of global warming.