Make the Switch to Renewable Energy for Your Electric Supply

We should all put our money where our mouth is. I don't think it will taste very good, but that's another story. In other posts, I've been urging readers to vote as if our planet depended on it. This makes the choice very easy. Of course there are other things that we can do as well: reduce, reuse, recycle. Walk. Drive a fuel efficient car. Lower your thermostat in the winter, raise it in the summer. That kind of stuff.

There's another thing you can do as well: demand renewable energy. It's actually quite easy (even I was able to do it) and it may very well actually save you money. The way to do it is to change your electric energy supplier to a renewable source. I learned something about this from the Sierra Club Portage Trail Group's President's corner for September and October.  Therein, Colleen Orsburn states, "if you switch to one of these plans, your transmission utility does not change; for most of us, that is Ohio Edison, a FirstEnergy company.  And switching does not actually change the source of your electricity.  All generators feed power into the regional grid, and you get what you get.  What you are doing by switching to a renewable energy provider is offsetting your energy use with the purchase of Renewable Energy Credits, which in turn support renewable energy generation projects."   So it's mostly just going to have the effect of increasing the demand for green energy.

The directions are there, and they may well work for you if you live in Northeast Ohio. But they didn't quite work for me, because my current supplier is NOPEC-First Energy Solutions. NOPEC would charge a $75 early termination fee to switch to a Green Energy supplier listed at the First Energy website. I didn't want to pay that.

But never fear. NOPEC itself has a renewable energy option that I was able to switch to without incurring the termination fee. And the fixed rate is cheaper than the one I had by about ten percent!

I urge you to make the switch as well. It's just a small thing, but if a enough of us do it, it could be huge.