Energy Audit #3: Where does my power come from?

This article is part 3 of a series.  Read previous article.

Growing up, I was blessed with four younger sisters. As a result, I was intensely interested in where babies came from, and received several progressive "birds and the bees" lectures as our family count and my age increased.

I had no similar interest in where electricity came from. Power was a constant in life, except for occasional  outages, which were really just an excuse to tell ghost stories and eat all of the ice cream in the freezer. Flip a switch, and voila! Power was always there. Like air or sibling rivalry, it was always there. It needed no origin story.

For me, it's time to finally tell one.

Before we start with the mechanics of "how" power arrives at my condo, perhaps it's best to start with "who" is involved.

My power comes from a company called Puget Sound Energy, the biggest and oldest provider of power in the Pacific Northwest. Currently a wholly owned subsidiary of Puget Energy (stock ticker: PSD), they are in the process of being sold for $5B to a group of private investors out of New York.

PSE generates electricity for over 1 million people in Western Washington, and provides Natural Gas to another 750k. It generates about a third the power that goes to its customers, and purchases the rest from local companies.

I was really surprised by the overall power mix PSE supplies. The largest source of its power is hydro-electric, followed by coal, natural gas, and a piddly 1% of nuclear energy.

Currently, less than 3% of PSE's current power comes from renewable sources: 2% comes from wind farms, and 1% from waste, biomass, and other resources. 

I'm happy to see that hydro-electric is the primary source of power. We should consider ourselves lucky to have so much water as a resource in the Pacific Northwest. While hydro-electric has some downsides due to the habitat destruction it can enable, from a carbon footprint perspective it is vastly superior to gas and coal based sources.

Along with the dams and coal/gas plants that PSE owns and operates, it also has two large windfarms in Eastern Washington, making it the largest provider of renewable energy in the Pacific Northwest. They also have a proposal on their web site for a solar plant to be built on the site of one of their wind farms.

At a surface level, it appears that PSE has committed itself to green power. The goals they have set for themselves are ambitious: 10% of their power needs to come from renewable sources by 2013. And Washington voters have upped the stakes further: renewable energy needs to represent 15% of their portfolio by 2020.

The sale of PSE seems to be a good move to give it the financial solvency it needs to achieve those goals, as well as continuing repairs from the 2006 wind storm and reinforcing the existing grid.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the fantastic resources they have made available on their website, including:

• Rebates and coupons on all kinds of green products
• Tools to monitor and improve your energy usage
• Sign up for the Green Power Program, a program that charges you a little extra for power to support their development of renewable energy

It eases my mind significantly to understand that our power company values both renewables and conservation, and is making strides on both fronts. But what do my more informed readers think? Does it go far enough?

Comments

[Simon Morris]

You might want to look at this video about cities around the world following Sydney's lead in a big switchoff next year.

[Simon Morris]

Sorry, click on me for the url