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Trying to Live Green

I mentioned in the previous post that I’ll be heading down to the fair grounds for this year’s Living Green Expo.

This is something I think about a fair amount… We all drive cars, use energy, do wasteful things, throw away recyclebles, eat cow, etc. There are things you could do… like spend, oh, about $25,000 to install solar panels on your house, sell your car and buy the patent for that stair stepper bike that dude in downtown Minneapolis rides around, get a team of hamsters to generate electricity at your house, etc. But that’s not terribly feasible. And it’s not like you can go and install a huge wind turbine in your back yard either…

But here’s something you can do (if you are served by Xcel Energy in Colorado, New Mexico or Minnesota):

Go to this page at Xcel Energy about Windsource

Call them up, they will tell you how many blocks you use, and then you can buy the equivalent amount of wind energy.

There’s some fine print there, you aren’t insuring that the electricity that comes to your house was wind-generated, but what you’re doing is basically adding more wind-energy to Xcel’s overall pool.

You can cover up-to your average electricity bill, so I bought 5 blocks, which was an extra $10 a month.

It’s a little something you can do, and it won’t break the bank either.