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10 February 2010
Posted in
3) Winds of Change
Perhaps you haven’t heard, but there’s a new breeze blowin’ in… a wind-powered breeze. In Atlantic Canada, there is now a new choice for clean, green energy for your home, or your business…
- Bullfrog Power
- Green, Quick, Easy & Cheap: Too Good to be True?
- Your Green Energy Choices: Current & Future
- Subtle but Significant Impact of Your Green Energy Choice
Bullfrog Power
There are no major start-up costs required, nor extra wiring, or special gadgets. Your home is still powered the same way it was before, from your local grid. The difference is that if you enlist the Bullfrog Power service (less than $1 per day for most homes), they inject the clean, green equivalent of the energy to power your home or business into your existing power grid.
Green, Quick, Easy & Cheap: Too Good to be True?
And, it only takes about 5 minutes on-line to sign-up for the service. It’s low cost, no hassle, and your starting a new ‘habit’ that helps improve the health of the planet.
Sound too good to be true? Part of it is, yet it is still a good new ‘habit’ to start. Here’s why:
Bullfrog buys surplus power from existing wind turbines (~80%) and hydro-electric plants (~20%) in order to provide truly clean, green power. The more their customer base grows, the more clean power they buy to inject into the existing grid. The more green power injected into the grid, the less NS Power, or your local area grid energy provider, will have to rely on ‘dirtier’ energy sources to power their grid.
However, according to a NS Power representative exhibiting at the Atlantic Eco-Expo in November 2009, at this time, NS Power is NOT reducing it’s energy production rates at all as a result of the injection of clean energy into the grid by sources like Bullfrog. Because the current clean, green power injected makes up such a small amount relative to the demand from the grid, to date, their power generation plans and production remain unchanged as a result of the strides made by clean power producers.
Your Green Energy Choices: Current & Future
So unfortunately, at this time, the impact of your ‘greener’ and cleaner power choice on reducing power production by “dirtier” sources is negligible.
Yet, although the impact is subtle, it is still significant AND important.
While it’s true that NS Power is making strides to ‘green’ its power, due in no small part to the aggressive NS legislated clean energy production targets to “meet 25% of its energy needs through renewable sources by 2015” (Province of NS’s Amended Renewable Energy Standards) , there is still a majority reliance on ‘dirtier’ energy sources to power our grid.
However, NS Power’s website states that already: “… about 12% of the electricity we use every day in Nova Scotia comes from renewable energy sources (wind, hydro and tidal power)… 400 megawatts of renewable generation”, which they state has been owned and operated for decades by Nova Scotia Power. “We’re continuing to increase that amount” the web site also states, adding “the Province of Nova Scotia’s Renewable Energy Standards are driving many of the new (renewable energy) activities we have underway”.
NS Power and the Province of Nova Scotia got kudos recently in Copenhagen too because of their target setting for clean electricity generation in an effort to cut green house gases and control climate change, and also because of our 1st commercial turbine designed to harness power from the famous Bay of Fundy tides, deployed in November 2009.
Yet despite the glimmer of some good news regarding our local power utility’s current and future legislated renewable energy production, we still have a long road to go, and it’s a long time yet before 2015, when the NS Power renewable energy production targets must be met.
Subtle but Significant Impact of Your Green Energy Choice
All that said, although the impact of your ‘greener’ power choice remains subtle today, it IS significant:
- The more clean power Bullfrog buys, the more need there is for the green power sources, and the more new wind mills, farms and hydro-electric plants will come on-line to fulfill the demand.
- The more clean power sources are made available, the more grid power suppliers like NS Power will be able to rely in proportionally relevant parts on the clean power sources for their utilization.
- Once the greener power sources become consistently reliable as a quantifiable source that can be predicted, NS Power or other utilities can count on its production and potentially begin to reduce their own energy production, especially from ‘dirty’ sources.
- And thus, the more impactful your decision to purchase clean power today becomes for now, and for the future…
After that, we’ll have to work on fostering our ability to build wind turbines in Nova Scotia with subsidies from the government, or generating power from other renewable energy sources, so we can stop buying 'green' power from Maritime (mostly wind) or other sources (hydro). But we’ll have to leave that for a future dissertation…
There’s a new clean, breeze blowin’in. If you haven’t yet, you should consider being a part of it. Invest in clean, green energy; lobby your politicians regarding our local renewable energy generation opportunities; and become a contributor to true ‘winds of change’.
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