Efergy e2 Unboxing

First - The Box

Now - The Unboxing

Renewable Energy Focus Group

Last week I was invited to participate in a focus group for SRP, my electric utility.  I'd never been involved in one before, and my schedule was free, so I jumped on it.

It wasn't clear until nearly an hour into the discussion, but SRP is considering a new residential renewable energy purchasing plan for its customers, and they wanted to get feedback about various details from potential participants.

Currently, SRP allows customers to purchase blocks of "clean energy" in 100 kwh chunks for $3 each per month.  It's never clear what this money is used for and not many people participate.  I used to buy 10 blocks per month, but had to trim back to 5 during the Great Recession.  It helps ease my conscience, but isn't nearly as satisfying as having a solar array on my roof would be - I'm working on that.

SRP may offer a new program that would allow green minded customers to purchase a portion of renewable(probably solar) power from a particular plant that I believe they already have plans to build - the SRP representative didn't want to get specific about it when I asked.  This kind of plan still requires a bit of faith due to the nature of the electric grid: it's clearly not possible to send the power from one plant to specific addresses.

The main benefits of this program would include allowing renters to participate and providing a fixed cost to the customer over the period of the agreement (probably 5 years).  I other words, if I signed up, I would purchase some amount of power from this solar plant at slightly higher than average rate (11 cents vs 9 cents for example), but that rate would be guaranteed to never increase over the 5 year period.  We all know that SRP, APS, and every other electric utility tends to increase their rates by at least 5% per year on average, and frequently more.  The plan could also follow customers from one home to another, as long as they remain in SRP's service area.

A lot of the details were sketchy, but that's why they wanted our feedback, to see what people liked and didn't like.  I enjoyed the whole experience and I certainly was able to geek out about renewable energy and make some suggestions to actual SRP decision makers who were observing us from behind one way mirrors.  I would have done it for free, so the $75 I was paid was a bonus!