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Utility to offer 'green' option
FirstEnergy customers would pay extra
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Mary Vanac
Plain Dealer Reporter

FirstEnergy Corp. has proposed adding a "green option" to your monthly electric bill from Cleveland Electric Illuminating, Ohio Edison or Toledo Edison companies by as early as this summer. Under a plan filed Tuesday with the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, FirstEnergy would enable customers to pay an extra charge each month to support companies that use renewable sources - wind and solar power, for instance - to make electricity.

The charge - likely to be a few dollars a month - is voluntary and "isn't tied to their [electric] usage at all," said FirstEnergy spokeswoman Ellen Raines. Rather, the charge would be related to "renewable-energy certificates" that FirstEnergy would buy from a company that creates power with wind, solar or geothermal energy. If the PUCO approves the utility's plan, FirstEnergy would buy these certificates, each of which would be equivalent to one megawatt-hour of electricity produced by alternative means.
FirstEnergy customers then would buy the certificates in 100-kilowatt-hour blocks from the utility.

Customers would be able to purchase from two to 50 blocks each month and stop buying them at any time. Where would the extra payments go? To the company that produces electricity from renewable sources. The additional revenue provided by the payments could encourage that company to build more windmills or solar panels, said Ryan Lippe, communications specialist for the Office of the Ohio Consumers' Counsel, which helped design the plan with FirstEnergy and the PUCO. "Residential consumers will be able to support the important benefits of renewable power through this program," Consumers' Counsel Janine Migden-Ostrander said in a written statement. If approved, the plan also would help resolve a dispute over FirstEnergy's plan to stabilize its electricity rates through 2008, said Shana Eiselstein, a PUCO spokeswoman. A new state law requires that utilities offer customers a choice of electric producer. The green option could answer that requirement. "What you pay for is the benefit of replacing nonrenewable sources with renewable sources on the electric grid," Eiselstein said.