Did you know NStar offers wind energy?

[amethystmoon.livejournal.com]

For a premium of 0.837 cents per kWh for 50% of your energy to be wind-sourced, or 1.396 cents per kWh for 100% of your energy. Details on their site: http://www.nstar.com/residential/customer_information/nstar_green/nstar_green.asp

My apartment's NStar account is in a roomie's name, so I haven't been able to log in and try to sign up yet, but the site implies that there are not location restrictions, and that these options are available to all their customers. If you've already signed up, I'd love to hear about whether you ran into any issues.

Comments

[tisana.livejournal.com]

Cool! I had no idea.
And I just signed up to access my account online, too.
Thanks.

[m00n.livejournal.com]

FYI the difference in price for me was $0.02771 per kwh, which amounts to about $7.56/month in my 750 square foot apartment with gas heat/hot water, an electric stove/oven and early 1990s refrigerator.

A pretty good deal all things considered, if you ask me. Plus you get a cool little green "NStar Green" flag to put in front of your house! ;-)

[shana-lyons.livejournal.com]

We signed up for this a while ago and we just got the little green flag in the mail. I was kind of bummed because I wonder how much of the energy efficiency I had just paid good money to purchase was squandered in the creation, mailing, and eventual disposal of the flag. I felt like they had mitigated my guilt mitigation strategy. :)

[shana-lyons.livejournal.com]

Oh, to actually respond to your post, we had no issues whatsoever with the signup.

[chenoameg.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm not too happy about the flag. Couldn't they have at least sent something useful if they had to send a newly manufactured thing?

I mailed it back to them in the hopes they could send it to someone who appreciates it more.

[m00n.livejournal.com]

Heh, yeah, we had a similar conversation in my house. Something to the effect of "please tell me this is at least made from recycled plastic or something."

On the other hand, if putting it up in front of the house gets more people to sign up, that's probably a net-good thing.

[rxrfrx.livejournal.com]

Do you have any knowledge re: the scalability of wind power in this area of the country? In most places, it's useless to pay extra for wind power because even if 100% of electric customers wanted to do this, the power company couldn't deliver wind power at more than, say, 5% of total electricity generation. Just curious.

ISO-NE

[babstaah.livejournal.com]

ISO New England has a bunch of info on their website. A quick look at the most recent CELT report, http://www.iso-ne.com/trans/celt/report/index.html, shows current wind capacity in the ISO-NE region at 6 MW versus the total capacity in the system of roughly 32,000 MW. Obviously, available wind capacity in New England is minuscule, I'm curious as to where NSTAR is getting the wind power from.

Re: ISO-NE

[smammy]

According to NSTAR, Maple Ridge Wind Farm in upstate New York.

[smammy]

I'm somewhat concerned about the language NSTAR uses in describing the program: Customers choosing to have 50% of their electricity support wind power pay an additional 0.837 cents per kWh, while customers choosing to have 100% of their electricity support wind power pay an additional 1.396 cents per kWh. (Emphasis added.) If I'll be buying wind-generated electricity (or more accurately, paying for NSTAR to buy wind-generated electricity to meet my demand) then why not say so? How exactly will I "support" wind power? Smells suspicious...

Re: ISO-NE

[babstaah.livejournal.com]

Now I'm curious why NY is letting their renewable energy leave the state, http://www.mapleridgewind.com/whytughill.htm.

[boywonder.livejournal.com]

Same conversation here when our flag arrived.

[boywonder.livejournal.com]

The premium you pay for wind power goes to develop more wind farms, currently, the money is going in part towards the construction of a wind farm in Maine.

[derekp.livejournal.com]

From what I understand, if you sign up for this program your particular house is still being served by the pool of energy available to NStar. Your house is no greener than the house next door. NStar has no way to say "Route only green power to this house."

I don't see how this is any different than buying offset credits, but I imagine NStar gets a nice little cut somehow.

If someone could tell me I'm wrong on both points, I'd be glad to sign up.

[smammy]

Well, yeah, obviously. It's a grid. But "support wind power" seems unnecessarily vague. I would like to know that by paying that premium, for the amount of electricity I'm using, there's an equal amount of wind-generated electricity that NStar is buying, presumably cutting down on the amount of fossil-fuel-generated electricity they have to buy. If that's the case, then this is way better than buying offsets.

[smammy]

I actually go back and read the whole NStar page on this. NStar is purchasing fixed amounts of wind-sourced electricity (30 MW right now), and using your premium to pay for it, invest in future wind farms, and pad their executives' pockets. If those who sign up for this program use more than 30 MW, it's not like they buy more.