Alternative Electric Generator for Rhode Island

I'm glad to see that Rhode Island and New England in general have the opportunity to choose the generation company used to provide their electric needs. Rhode Island Green Start allows the customer to select a company that uses 100% non-fossil fuel energy sources, and National Grid handles the billing and delivery. This gives customers an opportunity to vote with their dollars at a relatively low cost increase due to higher generation charges. The program allows the customer to allocate either 50% or 100% of their energy use as coming from a green energy program. Additional cost is 2.4c/kWh for 100% or 1.25c/kWh for the lower.

If you want to sign up, you can sign-up on the GreenStart site. You'll need to have your electric bill account number. After signing up, National Grid will handle purchasing the generation certificates needed to certify that the amount of power used in the your home was purchased from a renewable energy provider.

PA used to offer a similar program to this, as I recall the provider was Green Mountain Energy, but that went away and the only way to contribute to renewable electric technologies was to essentially buy your electricity twice. Being a bit of a fiscal conservative, that never made much sense to me.