We are Bullfrog Powered!

I received email notification today that as of this month, our house will be considered "Bullfrog Powered." Bullfrog Power is a Canadian company based in Ontario that recently started offering services in Alberta. Here is how Bullfrog explains how it works:

When you sign up with Bullfrog Power, you don’t need to switch electricity suppliers. Your electricity supplier tells us exactly how much power your home consumes. We then inject green electricity onto the grid on your behalf to match the amount of power you use. You continue to pay your local supplier for your basic electricity service, and receive a separate bill from Bullfrog for the greening of your power supply. And because you continue drawing power from the grid in the same way, there is no change in service reliability. It’s that simple.

Bullfrog uses the extra 2 cents per kilowatt hour we pay to ensure that an equivalent amount of Alberta-generated wind-powered energy is injected into the power grid on our behalf. The email they sent me today says this will cost us an extra $7.22 per month, based on our electricity consumption over the past 12 months. More wind power generation means less coal-fired power, which the Bullfrog People tell me will result in our household reducing our greenhouse gas emissions by this much per year:

• CO2: 1.24 tonnes
• NO: 2.08 kilograms
• SO2: 3.16 kilograms
  

This also reduces our consumption number for the 90% reduction project, since according to the project organizers, "Hydro and Wind are deemed to have a 4 to 1 payback over other methods - you get 4 times as many." According to our power company we used an average of 360.981 kWh per month over the previous 12 months. Since we get a 4:1 credit for wind power, this is the equivalent of 90.25 kWh per month. By the 90% rules we are permitted 91.6 kWh per month, which means we have slightly exceeded the 90% reduction target! The best part is, I know we can go even lower once we convert more bulbs to CFLs and keep our TV turned off.

I invite any Albertans or Ontarians reading this to check out Bullfrog Power for themselves and consider spending the extra 2 cents per kWh. You can probably offset the extra cost by taking some conservation measures, and do even more good that way!