Apparently, Green Mountain Energy Company has been offering alternative / renewable / clean energy generation in NJ for a little while now. I have just heard of them very recently, and I was curious if anyone has any experience with them. It seems almost too good to be true, so I thought I see if anyone else uses or has heard of them.

I never really have understood how energy distribution and payment works. No matter who you pay (and it's a monopoly here, so I understand it better here), you're getting your energy from the same grid. Duke Power, Progress Energy, Green Mountain, etc. all just put energy on the grid. There's some sort of payment system between the companies so that if Duke Power needs more than they can provide, then they pay Progress for it, for example. To me, this means that if enough people start paying Green Mountain, to the point that their customers subscribe to more than they produce, they have to buy power from someone else who is not "green". And if they don't have enough customers, another power company will buy their surplus. (One of the things I don't get is how they make sure that the right amount of power is on the grid.)

So I'm happy that there's a company that's producing cleaner power, though I imagine it's relatively little of it, but I don't quite get how using them as your power company will make anything any better.

Very true. I am looking at it more from the perspective of taking power off the grid rather than putting it on. I use X amount of kwh per month. This energy must be generated by someone. In the current (default) configuration, the generation / line / distribution charges all go to my local company. If I opt for Green Mountain, my local company still bills me for everything (generation / line / distribution) but must pay the credits or pass on the generation amount to Green Mountain (at a slightly higher price), rather than to their own generation facilities.

The way I understand it, I pay a little bit more for power generation, but the money I pay is directed away from the local (almost) monopoly using coal / oil / gas / nuclear and directed to Green Mountain that (allegedly) uses hydroelectric and wind.

My point being that no matter who you pay, it all eventually gets distributed the same way. I suppose it's possible that if Green Mountain maxes out their production capabilities with users then they'll get paid more than if they didn't, assuming that end-user kWhs gain them more revenue than distributor kWhs, but it's unlikely that they'll be running under capacity anyway.

Well, here in California, before the energy crisis it worked by having an hourly bidding process. Every hour, the energy companies say they can produce x kilowats, and they'll sell it for y. Then, the people who run the grid say we need z kilowats for the hour, pick all the lowest priced suppliers, and I think pay them all the highest bid they accept. Imagine what happens under this system when deman exceeds supply. Now imagine what happens when you fix the price that the energy companies can sell it at to consumers, thus eleminating any link between supply and demand.(*)

Lucky for us, we've now got Arnold fixing all of this.

I suspect Green Mountain works by pulling your buying out of the general power market. Instead of the energy company buying the cheapest electricty around, they have to buy enough to cover you from Green Mountain.

(*)This is how I remember it, I could be completely wrong.

Matthew

The idea is, the more people who sign up for their power (and hence, the more they have to pump into the grid), the more money they get to expand their renewable generating schemes (and the less money goes to funding new traditional power stations, in the long run).

This is offered by many of the companies in the UK too, usually at a small premium.

Hugo