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veen  ·  2243 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: After 100 years of rising, electricity demand in the US has been flat for the past decade

    Shit, if I get to pick who I buy long distance service from, surely I should in theory be able to pick who I buy power from.

You can't? I'm surprised you guys don't have something similar over there.

Regardless, I got to pick my own energy supplier last week for my new apartment. The energy market is kinda weird - more than half of consumers buy green energy here, but what you're paying for is that your energy supplier buys energy rights to renewable energy sources. That renewable energy can come from various places in Europe - there have been cases where it was cheaper for biomass energy plants to import pellets from the U.S. and burn it up for the EU market, so it's not always so "green". In my case, I pay a few euros per month to force my energy supplier to buy local wind energy on the market whenever possible. Or is that similar to what you're paying extra for renewables?