Green Power Sources

What is Green Power?

Green Power is electricity produced using renewable energy resources. More and more homes & businesses can now buy green power as an alternative without changing energy supplier.

This article is about green power sources - where it comes from & where you can get it. I have written a separate article that gives a general overview of what Green Power is.

Where does it come from?

Renewable energy resources rely on natural energy flows like the heat & light that comes from the sun or the energy contained in the movement of the wind or waves. These sources of energy either never run out or they are replaced at least as fast as they are consumed.

On the other hand, fossil fuels exist in limited quanitities. Once we've used up all the accessable fossil fuel stores that's it - they're gone.

The main green power sources are solar, wind, biogas, wave power, hydro & geothermal. I'll have a new article up soon to describe these different renewable energy sources in greater detail.

There are several ways to switch to green power

Make your own
There are ways you can generate your own electricity and greatly reduce your reliance on buying fossil-fuel generated power. The most common methods are solar panels and wind turbines. These take quite a bit of work & cost to set up but can be very worthwhile over the long term. You can sell any excess electricity back to the utiltity and either pay nothing for your energy use or make a profit.

Buy it from your usual utility company
You have the choice of buying all of your electricty as Green Power or just a portion of it. The main reason you might choose to buy only a portion of your power in this form is to save money. The option will usually be to buy either a percentage of your total electricity, a block of xKWh or all of your electricty as Green Power.

Renewable Energy Certificates, Green tags & Carbon Offsets
In the US you have another alternative to buying Green Power for your home and that is to buy renewable energy certificates (also known as Green Tags). These allow you to buy the benefits of renewable energy without directly buying the power itself.

Along the same line are carbon offsets which usually sell based on the amount of CO₂ you want to compensate for. An example of a CO₂ offset is to pay someone to plant enough trees to draw enough CO₂ out of the atmosphere to compensate for the electricity you use.

Why choose Green Power (Pros & Cons)

The most valuable reason to change to Green Power at the moment is because it will help dramatically reduce CO₂ emmissions. If we can start using more green power sources rather than fossil fuel sources we can slow or even stop global warming - without doing anything else.

There's another powerful benefit of switching though. Fossil fuels will run out and when they do we willl have no choice but to change. Currently renewable energy delivers only a small proportion of the world's energy needs but this will change because it must.

Is there a downside?

In some cases it can cost slightly more to buy Green Power rather than regular old fossil-fule generated power. You're probably looking at a few dollars extra per week. But if you look into saving energy in other ways you will easily be able to reduce your bills to make up for this cost.

The other thing to remember is that the more people who jump in and sign up for Green Power, the cheaper it will get. Green Power is really the easiest, most effective thing you can do to help the environment, so it's well worth it.

Source : http://www.how-to-stop-global-warming.com