This weekend I struck a blow for renewable energy with a vote from my wallet: I shifted over to an electricity provider that offers a one-hundred percent certified wind energy program. If you're one of the millions of electricity customers who feels like a slave to the international energy markets, you may have alternatives available. You just have to look!

One of the very few benefits of deregulating the power industry is that more and more utilities have at least limited competition for who actually provides the electricity (and gas) that you use.

Your utility company is still responsible for maintaining the physical electric grid all the way up to your house, and that part is still regulated. But in many areas you don't have to actually buy those little electrons from the company that maintains your wires.

Now, in shopping around for electricity, you could take the easy way out and just look for the cheapest option. Or - and what I hope you'll do - you can really do the world some good by shopping for what's often called a "green power" program.

What "green power" means is that the electricity is generated using renewable sources of energy, and more and more utility companies are offering green power plans. Depending on the provider, this electricity might be generated by wind farms, solar arrays, hydroelectric plants, wave power, biomass, geothermal, or some combination of these renewable energy sources.

Just to be clear here, I'm going to tell you up front that choosing a green power option from one of your available electricity providers might not be the cheapest option you have available right now. There are several reasons for this.

First, green power providers have been fighting an uphill battle against the established big kids on the block, mainly the coal and nuclear power industries. In conjunction with the oil industry (arguably the world's largest business), coal and nuclear power companies pour a huge amount of money into lobbying congress to make and sustain favorable legislation. The comparatively small sustainable energy industry has a hard time competing with the old school industries, and Congress (and many state governments) can be very fickle in its support. Democrat or Republican, many lawmakers just can't toss aside all the bucks that the established industries want to throw at them to keep us mired in coal and nuclear power (not to mention the truckloads of money the oil industry shovels into Washington).

Second, I think people often just never bothered to investigate their choices. When the power utilities were deregulated, how many of us actually did any shopping around for electricity? Hasn't it just been easier to let things ride as-is, just have our friendly utility company that runs the wires to our homes keep providing us with electricity, even if it's from a coal or nuclear plant? Just like with electricity itself, we tend to take the path of least resistance, and millions of us who do have some good alternatives simply have never even looked at them.

Third, there's a terrible misconception - or even the complete lack of one! - about sustainable energy sources. Just as one example, if I say "wind turbine," what's the first thing that pops into your head? Probably some little rinky-dink propeller some crackpot stuck up on the roof of his house to power a light bulb and a radio, right? You probably didn't imagine a huge propeller up to three hundred feet across, mounted on a tower that's nearly two-hundred and fifty feet tall, driving a generator that produces up to 2.5 megawatts of electricity.

Well, that's where technology is today, folks: what I just described is the Liberty Wind Turbine from Clipper Windpower. Most wind turbines are smaller than that one, but I think you get the picture (like the one to the right - some of these turbines are big!).

And much the same is true for the other technologies that are out there: solar, wave, biomass, and geothermal (and of course the grand-daddy, hydroelectric). The technology is here today. What we need to move away from the twentieth century to the twenty-first century is the will to use what we have, and to vote with our wallets and with our ballots to make the changes that today's technology makes possible.

Now for the bottom line question: will green power cost you more, less, or about the same? In the short term, it's going to depend on the options your potential electricity providers are offering. As a very general rule, green power tends to be slightly more expensive. Why? Because part of the money you're paying is being used by these green power companies for capital investment and development, because the government isn't subsidizing these industries very heavily and the competition - primarily coal - is a mature industry that's already paid off most of these costs (but is still getting subsidies from the government!).

But that's the short term. In the long term, particularly if we can get the government to put bigger subsidies into sustainable energy development and start chopping back the subsidies to coal and nuclear power, the cost over time will go down - a lot. While you can find differing figures on the web about how much it may come down, I look at it this way: it's all in the fuel. No matter how cheap a ton of coal might be to buy, it'll never be cheaper than wind, the energy from the sun, or the waves of the ocean. As for nuclear power (which is about twenty percent of US power production), there's never been anything cheap about it, and there never will be.

To give you an example of what I mean about fuel costs, let's take another look at the Liberty wind turbine that I mentioned earlier. If you set up a wind farm using sixty-five Liberty wind turbines to crank out an average of one-hundred megawatts of power, here's the rough equivalent fuel usage for coal, natural gas, and crude oil over a thirty year period (figures from Cipper Windpower):

• Coal: 3,510,000 tons
• Natural Gas: 78,000,000,000 cubic feet
• Crude Oil: 14,040,000 barrels

Now, maybe you think those figures are a bunch of baloney. And who knows, you could be right. But the fact is that the "fuel" for wind energy (or solar, etc.) is always going to be free, while we are always going to have to pay something for fossile fuels and nuclear power. And as time goes on and world competition increases for limited fossile fuel resources, we're going to have to pay more. And that, ladies and gentlemen, will continue to drive up your electric bills!

Okay, so maybe now you're thinking that you should at least look into your options for who supplies your electricity. I'm hoping I've convinced you to think seriously about getting green power, even if it might cost you a bit more in the short term. But how do you do it?

It's actually fairly easy, if my experience was any example. But your utility may make you work for it a bit: after all, they don't really want you to buy your electricity from someone else, do they?! But it's worth your time to poke around, and should only take you a few minutes to get a handle on your options.

Let's use our utility, Baltimore Gas & Electric, or BGE as an example. If you go to their web site, you'll see a link called "Energy Choices". On the Energy Choice page, there are some links for more information, but the one that we want to look at is for "Residential" customer choice (but if you were a business, you'd look at the business link).

Clicking on the "Residential" link takes you to a page that gives a bit of information and two more links: Electricity and Gas. Since our focus at the moment is on electricity, click on that one.

Again, there's more information, but the critical link on the Residential Electricity page is "Shopping for a Supplier". That takes you to the really key information you need to find out what other electricity suppliers you can choose from.

About a quarter way down the page is a link called "list of BGE qualified electricity suppliers." While you can find a bunch of other good information on some of the other links, this one cuts to the heart of the matter. So click on that puppy!

Finally you're where you want to be: at a list of BGE's competition to provide you with electricity! This is where you start your shopping. And like I said earlier, your utility makes it a little bit of work to find their competitors, but it's not hard to do.

At this point, still playing the role of a BGE customer, you'd go through the links and see which ones have the options and pricing that you like. In my case, I settled on Commerce Energy, because they offer a program where I can buy 100% of my electricity from a sustainable non-polluting source, in this case wind power.

From there it was an easy process to sign up to get our green power, with our new electricity provider - Commerce Energy - taking care of all the coordination with BGE. Quick and easy!

So, folks, that's how you do it! Again, the actual short-term cost is going to vary. In our case, the price of our wind program is about one and a half cents more per kilowatt hour than BGE's current rates. But since BGE is going to be raising their rates again in June after a huge increase last year, I figure the price will even out.

But the best thing is that I made a vote that counts: with my wallet. I'm not going to support power generation from sources that spew poison into the air like coal, are economically unsustainable and downright dangerous like nuclear power, or that perpetuate our addiction to foreign oil. All these options cost us a huge amount of money in health care (not to mention the human suffering), and I want my kids to grow up in a cleaner world.

The government can dork around all it wants, but I'm casting my lot and my money in favor of helping to move our country into the next century with green power. I hope you will, too!

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