Not-so-Green Mountain Energy

For as long as I can remember, I've been buying my electricity through a third-party supplier. Obviously, this doesn't mean that I have a direct line from my home to this company and they're feeding in only the particular stream of electrons that they generate; rather, it means that I pay a fee for that provider to feed a certain amount of power into our local electric grid. On my electric bill, there are two separate charges: one to the third-party supplier for generating the power, and one to my local utility, PSE&G, for delivering it via the grid.

Unlike most people, I don't do this to save money. I do it because it's the easiest way to power my home with renewable energy. (We've considered installing solar panels, but at first we hesitated due to the price, and eventually we learned that we don't qualify for solar because our power usage is too small.) 

For many years, I used a supplier I chose through the NJ Clean Power Choice program. Then, a few years back, the state of New Jersey canceled that program and required anyone who wanted to switch providers to do it through NJ Powerswitch instead. This was much more complicated, because there were a lot of providers to choose from and no indication as to which ones used renewable energy, but eventually I managed to find a supplier called Ambit Energy that offered plan with 100 percent renewable-generated electricity for only about a penny more per kilowatt-hour than we'd have paid through PSE&G.

But last year, I received a notice from Ambit informing me that they would be switching me over to their new regional power plan. They included an environmental disclosure showing what energy sources went into producing the power for this plan — and lo and behold, it was mostly fossil fuels. It actually had a larger carbon footprint than the power sold directly by PSE&G, which is mainly nuclear.

So I went back to the drawing board again and found a new power supplier: Green Mountain Energy, which I'd used before in the old Clean Power Choice days. It offered a plan with 100 percent wind energy for just a little more than we'd been paying with Ambit. So, problem solved.

Or rather, so I thought. Because last month, I received an Environmental Information Disclosure (EID) from Green Mountain, informing me that their power mix was more than half fossil fuels: 22 percent coal and 38 percent natural gas. Less than 5 percent of it came from renewable sources.

Hoping this was a mistake, I called up Green Mountain Energy to ask for an explanation. The person I got didn't seem to know what was going on and put me on hold several times, but eventually she came back with an explanation: that EID didn't apply to me, because the plan I was on included the purchase of RECs, or Renewable Energy Certificates. These are tools a power provider can use to buy its energy from a green energy supplier — which is exactly what I thought I was doing directly by using Green Mountain. But it turned out Green Mountain was not itself generating power from wind, as it had specifically claimed; it was merely paying some other provider (not necessarily in New Jersey) to do so.

When I expressed some frustration over this, the person on the phone tried to explain to me that, well, look, RECs are the only way you actually can buy renewable energy, because it's all going into the same grid. When I replied that yes, I knew what RECs were, but I thought I was buying my clean energy directly from the supplier, and not from a middleman who was paying money to the supplier, she had to admit that, well, no, that was not the case.

So for the third time, I had to go through the incredibly cumbersome process of trying to compare power suppliers on the NJ Powerswitch site, clicking through to each supplier's website and hunting until I found information about both its rates and its energy sources. It took me about an hour of work to figure out that the best available price for a plan with 100 percent renewable energy was 13.24 cents per kWh from North American Power — just a fraction of a cent more than we'd been paying with Green Mountain. 

But when I clicked on "more details," I found this little tidbit of info:

NAP purchases and retires renewable energy certificates (“RECs”) to match the applicable percent of your electricity usage, above and beyond any state renewable portfolio standard requirements. Your energy consumption for this product is offset by RECs from eligible sources including, but not limited to a mix of hydro and wind.

In other words, if we switched to NAP, we'd be getting essentially the same deal we were getting from Green Mountain. Rather than paying the supplier to put green energy into the grid directly, we'd be paying a broker to buy RECs from other renewable energy suppliers. So logically, it made no sense to switch. If we simply stuck with Green Mountain, we'd be doing the environment exactly as much good as we would with NAP, and we'd pay a little less per kWh.

But I decided to switch anyway, and for one very simple reason: NAP told us the truth about what they were doing. They disclosed right up front that they were not generating clean power themselves, but paying someone else to do it. Green Mountain, by contrast, gave us a contract promising that our energy would come from 100 percent renewable sources, then sent us an EID saying that, well, actually, it came mostly from fossil fuels, and only after I called them up and spent half an hour on hold admitted that they were just buying green energy from someone else.

Maybe it's irrational to be willing to pay an extra three-quarters of a cent per kWh to a company just for being honest with us upfront. But it's a kind of irrational I can live with.