GP: Salon.com - Green power in the red

[Craig Hibberd <chibberd@earthlink.net>]

The following excerpts are from a recent Salon.com piece on green
power.  See the entire article at:

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/01/18/green_power/index.html

------------------------

Green power in the red - Electricity deregulation is bankrupting
California's fledgling eco-friendly energy industry.

Jan. 18, 2001 | In April, Ray Levinson persuaded the U.S. Postal Service
to make the largest federal purchase of eco-friendly power in U.S.
history. After two years of effort, Levinson, an environmental
compliance manager for the USPS, led 1,100 California post offices away
from power generated by coal and natural gas and to Go-Green, a "green"
power company.

In September, Go-Green founder Rick Kohl told Levinson that he was
having trouble getting enough credit to buy green power from power
wholesalers. The wholesalers (Calpine, Enron and others) had jacked up
their prices from 6 cents per kilowatt-hour to about $1.50. Kohl told
Levinson that some of the post offices would be forced to return to PG&E
and other so-called brown power companies. Then, in December, Go-Green
went out of business, abandoning not just the post offices but also MCI
WorldCom and 2,500 residential customers who had also decided to go
green.

The death of small green companies combined with a rush to build would
undermine "one of the primary hopes associated with electricity
restructuring, the idea that people could choose to reduce the
environmental impact of the electricity they consume," says Bill Golove,
a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories researcher who focuses on
electricity restructuring.



____________________________________________________________________________
This discussion group is sponsored in part by:
* Center for Renewable Energy and Sustainable Technology, http://www.crest.org
* Global Environmental Options, http://www.geonetwork.org
Archives and related documents can be found at at: http://www.green-power.com