Conscious Choice: The Power to Choose Green

March 1999 | News of the Earth

The Power to Choose Green

by Deb Anderson

Environmental Disclosure Reveals the Dirty Truth About Your Electricity
Do you know how much pollution is lurking in your light bulb? Soon a new "electricity label" will reveal just how much pollution utilities are producing and where that electricity comes from. Known as environmental disclosure, these new electricity labels will start appearing in Illinois as a separate, quarterly bill insert this spring, and eventually will help consumers choose among power companies.

Most people do not realize electric utilities are the biggest polluters in the Midwest. Air pollution from coal plants causes smog, acid rain, and global warming, and is a particular danger to people suffering from asthma and other respiratory problems. Nuclear plants produce hazardous radioactive waste that sits on the shores of the Great Lakes and Illinois waterways, threatening our health and environment. We have been forced to buy polluting electricity because we did not have a choice, but that could change under deregulation.

In other states that already have electricity competition, power companies are offering a mix of cleaner and renewable power sources, some packaged with energy efficiency incentives. For example, in the future we may be able to get some of our energy from wind power without needing a wind turbine in our back yard. When competition arrives in 2002, utility customers will be able to shop around for a power company to find the offer with both the lowest price and the least pollution. Environmental disclosure will make it easier for us to comparison-shop among competing electric suppliers and to choose cleaner energy that is better for the environment.

Environmental disclosure is a great tool to make electricity competition work better, and to empower environmentally-conscious consumers to make informed choices," said Howard Learner, executive director of the Environmental Law and Policy Center, the group leading the disclosure campaign. "Consumers have a right to know how much our electricity suppliers are polluting our environment. These bill inserts will tell us where our power comes from and how much pollution it causes."

The inserts, all of which will have a consistent format and color scheme, will contain a color pie chart and a table listing the percentages of the following fuel sources used to generate a customer’s electricity: biomass, coal, hydro, natural gas, nuclear, oil-fired, solar, and wind power. The environmental insert will also have a second table listing how much of each pollutant (carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, high-level nuclear waste, and low-level nuclear waste) is produced for every 1000 kilowatt-hours of electricity. The disclosure forms will appear in every Illinois electricity customers’ bill four times per year, and a copy of every environmental disclosure form will be available for comparison on the Illinois Commerce Commission’s web site.

Making the Connection
Environmentalists hope disclosure will solidify the connection in people’s minds between the light switch on the wall and the smokestack and nuclear waste at the power plant. During the fuel crisis in the 1970s, people thought much more about energy efficiency and the pollution caused by our electricity use. In a 1997 poll commissioned by the Environmental Law and Policy Center, only two percent of respondents correctly named a combination of coal and nuclear power as the source of their electricity, and 62 percent said they simply did not know. With prices at record lows, people just do not think much about energy much these days. However, soon we will be asked to make decisions about our electricity supplier that can have a major impact on the environment. Environmental disclosure will help us learn more about our sources of electricity, and what cleaner options we may have in the future.

The disclosure movement has grown out of the telephone deregulation experience, in which consumers were overwhelmed by competing, contradictory claims of telephone companies all promising the "best deal." Without standardized information, it was almost impossible to know, for example, whether five-cent Sundays were really better than ten cents per minute. With disclosure, when power companies try to sell themselves as a "green" company, consumers can use the environmental disclosure information to determine which company’s electricity is really better for the environment. As we know from telephone deregulation, relying on a company’s marketing information to choose a company can be like comparing apples and oranges.

"Apples and Apples"
Energy regulators found help in an unlikely source: food labeling. The Food and Drug Administration’s "Nutrition Facts" label became the model for environmental disclosure because of its clear, consistent means of revealing the nutritional content of food products. When food manufacturers started to make claims such as "low fat" and "natural" on processed foods like cupcakes, it was nearly impossible for consumers to know if the claims were truthful without analyzing the food in a laboratory. As with processed food, we don’t know how our electricity was made, so we are at the mercy of marketing information telling us whether our electricity is really cleaner. Disclosure provides a means to make an "apples-and-apples" comparison between electricity companies based on the amount of pollution they create, and the amount of cleaner, renewable resources they use. Look for the new bill inserts starting this March!

Unfortunately, consumer choice is still three years away. Until 2002, when true electricity competition takes effect, we can use the disclosure forms to learn more about the pollution created by our electric utilities. For the very first time electricity customers will be confronted with pollution facts produced by their power company. Several other states, including California, New York, and the New England states, are also implementing electricity information labels as part of their deregulation plans.

What can we do until we have the power to choose clean energy? We can let our utilities know that in the future we want cleaner, renewable energy choices, or we will take our business elsewhere. Write your utility company and your local newspaper, and tell others to do the same. If enough people demand cleaner power, we will motivate utilities to reduce our air pollution, create a larger market for renewable energy resources, cause less nuclear waste, and help all of us enjoy a healthier environment.

For more information on environmental disclosure and a sample of what the new label will look like, visit the Environmental Law and Policy Center web site or contact Deborah Anderson, at 312-759-3400. The ICC also has a web site.

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