Living Like Ed (25 page)

So for what little power I use—the less than 10 percent of my consumption for this house, including Rachelle’s Pilates studio with the heat on for most of the winter and the air conditioner on for most of the summer, with my larger electric car, with my Begley’s Best business, with our daughter and laundry and all kinds of activities—it’s still only $600 a year worth of grid power, and all of it’s green power. It’s green as the solar on my roof. It’s just coming from elsewhere.

Paying It Back with TerraPass

You can also do something that’s very simple—that’s just as green and just as real. You can sign up for a carbon offset pass. In Chapter 2 I showed how purchasing these carbon offsets allows you to mitigate the pollution coming from your car and your air travel. Well, you can also mitigate it from your home energy use.

Let’s say they don’t offer a green power program in the town where you live. You can still have your own personal green power program because you’re buying real green power that’s really going into the grid from TerraPass or another company like it.

This carbon offset won’t stop the pollution being made where you live by the power plant that serves you, but somewhere in the country there’s real green power being put into the grid, and that green power offsets the carbon emissions from the power you’re actually using.

So how do you sign up? You go to the TerraPass website’s section on home energy use. They have a screen with different fields. “How much electricity do you use in a year?”

I have no idea. “Honey, give me the bill. Let’s see.”

You can give me a winter month and a summer month, and there’s a way to figure out how much energy you use in a year. I didn’t know this, but I use 1,200 kilowatt-hours a month. Who knew? I never knew this, but they asked me to get this information, so I did, and then I typed in “1,200 kilowatt-hours a month.”

Next they ask, “Where do you live?” They ask you a few questions.

Then they mitigate. They know by state, by region, the amount of natural gas and coal from your region that you’re probably going to use for your power consumption.

They put that into an equation and they say, for example, “For a TerraPass, we’re going to charge you $35 a year”—or $135 a year, depending on how much power you use and where you live.

So, as I mentioned in Chapter 2, there’re forty thousand people signed up with TerraPass now. What would happen if everybody did that? What if four million people signed up? What would happen then?

I’ll tell you what would happen. One by one, utility companies would say, “You know what? Let’s shut down that dirty power plant that we’re getting all those fines for that’s not cost effective to run anymore. We’ve got all these people signed up for TerraPass. They put up a whole state’s worth of green energy in the form of wind. So shut down that coal plant. Did I say one? Shut down two of those coal plants in Indiana that are getting fined.”

So yes, there’s still real pollution that you’re creating by using the power wherever you may be. But then there’s also a real offset, which will really eliminate considerable pollution as more and more people sign up. That’s just as real.

The Downside of Green Power

Now, naysayers are quick to point out that green forms of power have consequences. And they do:

HYDROELECTRIC POWER.
Though totally clean from an emissions standpoint, these big hydroelectric power plants have a cost. They first and foremost prevent many species of fish from reaching their spawning grounds. And then, like the wind turbines, they act as a giant Cuisinart, chopping up fish in their turbines. So they affect the natural habitat of fish and other wildlife.

Now, the hydro-plants recognize this, and they’ve taken some steps to try to fix the problems. For instance, some utilities have built
fish ladders
to help salmon get past a dam so they can reach their spawning grounds up-stream.

The smaller hydoelectric power plants are more environmentally friendly because they do not restrict the flow of a waterway in a manner that is anything like that. The river is allowed to flow and a smaller amount of electricity is harvested in a less restrictive manner.

Homeowners who have rights to a waterway on their property have regularly purchased small hydro units that simply capture the movement of their otherwise unrestricted stream. If you had a little stream and you had rights to the water in that stream, you’d install this little paddlewheel-like thing. It’s nothing a fish would want to swim into. It would be like a suicide attempt. Like, “Let me go toward that thing that’s moving.” So a small hydro is much more green.

WIND POWER.
Wind turbines can destroy wildlife. You have to site them in a place that’s not in the Pacific Flyway, where you have a bunch of birds. You have to—as they have—slow down the blades and change the gearing so you get the same amount of rpm (revolutions per minute) that you need to your generator. You just change your gear ratio, so the blades are going slower. This way, the birds can dodge them better as they’re flying through these things that they don’t know could kill them. You put reflective coating on the blades so the bird has a better chance. You put up flashing strobes, night and day, so the bird can be like, “Ah! Something bad is there. Let me get away from it.” And all these things have greatly reduced the bird deaths.

I’m always thrilled by the output of my stand-alone hybrid solar/wind electric system.

Now, keep in mind, it’s not like birds don’t die in smokestacks. Plenty of birds die in “regular” power plants, too. So the people who are highly critical of wind turbines need to remember that there’s a consequence for every form of power.

SOLAR POWER.
When you make a solar panel, there’s gallium arsenide and there’re toxic elements, but they’re sequestered in a sealed panel. They don’t escape into the environment. Maybe when those panels break down—but you tell me when that’s gonna be, because I don’t know anybody who has a solar panel that’s broken. I mean, if you got out there with a handgun and shot holes into it, I suppose you’d have a problem. I can’t imagine how you’re going to have trouble in the long run with these solar panels. They’re pieces of crystal trapped behind pieces of glass or other transparent material on a metal frame. I don’t know how that’s going to break down.

And there are panels that are still working from the early space program in the ’60s. There are solar panels, not just in space, that have been putting out clean, green power for fifty years—very similar to the ones I have on my roof. So they work a long time. And I assume they can be recycled at some point. They can recycle circuit boards. They can recycle lots of other things.

So compare that tiny bit of toxic material in a solar panel with a coal plant that puts out plenty of mercury into the air that we all breathe, that gets into our blood systems, that puts out plenty of other toxic elements and air pollution. The quantities that we’re talking about are not even close. It’s a tea-spoon to a tanker truck.

Now, it’s true that solar panels provide electricity only during the day-light hours. That’s why God invented batteries—or net metering.

Nuclear Energy

Some people will also tell you that nuclear power is green power. There are renewed discussions of siting new nuclear power plants in many parts of the country as a remedy to global warming. I and many others are not in favor of that due to several factors. One, where do you put the waste? No one—not even the folks in Nevada, who are near the Yucca Mountain Repository—wants it near them. I wouldn’t want a nuclear power plant near me.

Nuclear energy is a devil’s bargain. Imagine if the ancient Egyptians had created a poison so toxic that it had just now reduced to half its potency. This material would have been available to every warring nation from that period to this—to fling in catapults, to fling in slingshots, to hide in their opponents’ homes or barracks—and we would have had to deal with that poison for the past several thousand years. I don’t like the sound of that. I don’t think we’re capable of having material that toxic available to so many people over such a long period of time. There is tremendous risk.

Then, there’s the issue of making more fissionable material available to those who wish to do us harm. Every single nation that has a nuclear
weapons
program started with a nuclear
energy
program.

The risk of a Chernobyl-type accident is also real. Keep in mind that the worst energy-related accident from having solar panels on your roof is that you might get bonked on the head if you didn’t bolt down a panel well.

Choosing a Shade of Green

You know, there are different shades of green. Burning biomass is greener than burning coal or burning crude oil. But we must all recognize that it’s best to pick the deepest shade of green that is available on our budget and in the realm of common sense.

For you, that might mean installing a solar electric system or a residential wind turbine. Or it might mean signing up for your local utility company’s green power program.

And I’d encourage everyone to sign up for TerraPass or one of the other carbon offset programs being offered today, so no matter where your power comes from, you help to add new green power to the grid and help to reduce the need for smoke-belching power plants.

What else can you do to choose a deeper shade of green? You can grow your own food and you can support your local organic farmers.