Antonia recently gave me a $5 gift card from Renewable Choice Energy. What that modest amount of money lets you do is basically convert a month's worth of the energy you use to wind power. (Though for me, the 250 kilowatt hours is more like two average months.) You still pay the same amount on your same electric bill, but 250 KWH of wind power energy gets added to the national power grid, chipping away at the 98% of the energy that's coming from non-renewable sources like fossil fuels. They estimate the impact of that as equivalent to not driving 429 miles, or planting 4 trees, or not burning 187 pounds of coal. In addition to the gift cards, you can also sign up for subscription plans on their site.
While I was thinking about that, I went to PG&E's website to check out my actual energy consumption, and I noticed a program they have called ClimateSmart. If you sign up for this, a small amount gets added to each electric bill, calculated to offset your energy usage by investing in projects to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Their estimate for me, based on my last bill of $15.27, was $0.33 or about 2%. At four bucks a year, I think that's worth doing.
So that's two easy things most of us can afford to do to improve our energy usage and our environment. Anybody have other good suggestions?
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