Almost exactly a year ago, I reported about a direct mail solicitation received from one of those retail electricity suppliers. Let’s call the company “Greenwashing Energy Choice.” Since then, that same company has been sending me similar pitches.
Meeting climate goals anywhere, including Massachusetts and Rhode Island, depends upon electrifying everything – cars, space heating, water heating, stoves, and clothes dryers. Combustion has to be phased out. Federal and state purchase incentives for many of those items help level the playing field on an up-front cost basis. However, they do not address operating costs. To meet our climate goals, we must reduce the ratio of prices for electricity versus prices for fossil fuels – the Spark Gap.
If you’re a New Englander concerned about climate change, you’re likely anxiously awaiting the results of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island’s joint offshore wind solicitation. With recent supply chain and economic constraints causing project costs to rise, the three states issued a joint solicitation to allow developers to bid on larger projects and access economies of scale in October of 2023. They received the following proposals in March of this year.
If there's one thing we hate at Green Energy Consumers Alliance, it’s greenwashing. This is the practice of exaggerating or lying about the worthiness of a good or service with respect to environmental impact. Our organization exists to help people find their way to economically and environmentally sound energy solutions. So, it breaks our hearts when we see some companies take advantage of the fact that it’s often easy to make a product sound better than it is. Case in point: Renewable energy in the electricity market.
For years, Green Energy Consumers has tried to educate consumers about the possibilities and pitfalls of choosing an electricity supply. Here’s a case study, from a recent personal experience.
Green Energy Consumers Alliance has been supporting a bill in the Massachusetts legislature that would stop retail electricity suppliers from signing up new customers on an individual basis. The bill would not affect municipal aggregation. The legislation has been sponsored by Rep. Frank Moran and Senator Brendan Crighton in collaboration with Attorney General Campbell and with the support of Governor Healey. The bill is a common sense reaction to the fact that the Attorney General’s office has solid data showing how consumers receiving power from competitive electricity suppliers have collectively paid over a half billion dollars more over six years than if they received service from their utility. Low-income families and people of color have been disproportionally targeted and harmed.
As more and more people switch from gas-powered cars to electric vehicles (EVs), we hear a lot of questions along the lines of “can the grid handle it?” Sometimes that question is about supply and emissions (i.e. will we have enough clean energy resources to supply all the kilowatt-hours of electricity those EVs will need?), sometimes it’s about reliability (can the infrastructure handle it?), and sometimes it’s about costs. We've written before about how we have time and tools to prepare for this transition. This blog specifically addresses the question of the grid costs of increased EV adoption.
We have sent six “Shave the Peak” alerts this summer, signaling high peak electric demand days. Shave the Peak is our program designed to inform people, via text and email alerts, how and when to reduce their power usage on days when the forecasted electric demand is above 22,000 MW.
As summer approaches, thousands of our followers are preparing to “Shave the Peak.”
Shave the Peak is our program designed to inform people, via text and email alerts, how and when to reduce power use on days when demand for electricity is significantly higher than usual.
Regular readers of our blogs know where we stand on options consumers have for receiving power supply. To recap: For customers of investor-owned utilities, you are better off, and the planet is better off if your community has green municipal aggregation than if you are on the utility’s Basic Service. And more than likely, you are going to pay more than you should if you choose a competitive electricity supplier on your own.
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