Boise wants you to participate in this Green Power Program. How does it work?
As part of its future energy plan, the city of Boise asks residents to participate in Idaho Power’s Green Power Program — a chance to support renewable energy.
Once it enters the electric grid, energy from one source looks identical to energy from any other source. So, the way to guarantee one household’s electricity is renewable involves a lot of accounting.
“The Western electric grid is often called the biggest, most complicated machine the entire world’s ever seen,” said Ben Otto, an energy associate at the Idaho Conservation League.
For an additional 1 cent per kilowatt-hour (kWh), residents can ensure their energy is coming from 100% renewable sources. One kWh is enough to power a regular 100-watt lightbulb for 10 hours. An average home powered by Idaho Power, according to its website, “uses about 950 kWh per month.” That customer would pay $9.50 per month more on their electricity bill for the Green Power Program.
Customers can decide whether to participate in the program for all their electricity needs, or they can buy into the program in 100-kWh chunks.
But, participating in this program does not mean a solar panel is directly connected to a customer’s house. Instead, the customer receives renewable energy certificates.
Electric accounting
If an employer deposits $20 in an employee’s bank account, the effect is the same as if it handed the employee a $20 bill. When the employee goes to a bank, the $20 bill they withdraw won’t have been touched by their employer, but their pay stub shows that the money came from there.
The same principle applies to electricity. Like the $20 bill, the actual energy powering a house is indistinguishable from other energy in the grid. The electricity producer generates a certificate with the energy, similar to a pay stub, so that customers know their electricity’s source.
These renewable energy certificates, called RECs, are “like a little birth certificate. … It represents when it was produced, where it came from, what facility it came from, the state, the county,” said Suzanne Smith, a program specialist at Idaho Power.
Unlike a pay stub, renewable energy certificates can be bought and sold independent of the electricity. When someone wants to claim that their electricity originated renewably, they need to use both a certificate and the corresponding amount of energy.
Idaho does not have a state law mandating how much of its electricity comes from renewable sources, but other states do.
Since there’s a demand for these certificates, the Idaho Public Utilities Commission requires Idaho Power, which provides energy to much of Southern Idaho, to sell them and use the proceeds to lower customers’ electricity costs.
What counts?
Because each state sets its own rules and goals for what counts as a renewable energy source, “You get these weird things where a REC generated in Oregon could qualify as a renewable energy credit in California, or it could not,” Otto said.
Since, as Otto also explained, the goal of the certificates is to create an incentive to build new clean energy facilities, “Almost every state defines RECs to exclude generation from existing hydro.”
When water flows from the top of a dam to the bottom, it flows through turbines that spin to generate electricity. This is called hydroelectric power.
Some states do buy certificates for energy from small and new hydroelectric plants, or from improvements in the efficiency of existing hydroelectric dams.
In 2020, about 42% of the energy that went into Idaho Power’s electric grid came from hydroelectric sources, 4% from solar and 11% from wind.
However, since Idaho Power sold the renewable energy certificates for everything it could, the energy delivered to a regular customer was technically 0% renewable. But 39% came from hydroelectric plants that don’t generate certificates.
Green Power Program
The Green Power Program allows customers to get certificates back, so that the energy they use is completely renewable. Just like for regular customers, Idaho Power first produces and buys energy, and then sells the corresponding renewable energy certificates.
At the end of the month, Smith explained, Idaho Power buys back some of the certificates for those participating in the Green Power Program.
In 2020, all the certificates bought for the program came from Idaho or Oregon.
“Some of it does end up coming from Idaho Power’s service area,” Smith said.
Half the certificates were from solar, half from wind.
The price of certificates fluctuates. While Green Power customers pay an additional 1 cent per kWh, a report on Boise’s energy plan states that the certificates themselves cost an average of 0.67 cents per kWh in 2018.
Money Idaho Power makes from the program goes to putting solar panels on schools and providing educational materials for students. According to Smith, any funds left over from that go toward growing the program, which currently includes less than 1% of Idaho Power’s customers.
Do Green Power Programs actually encourage clean energy generation?
Renewable energy certificates “were very important for the adoption of the first wind power and then solar power in the U.S., in the last, I guess, 15 years,” said Gregory Nemet, professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin.
Now, Nemet explained, renewables are getting less expensive, and the cost of storing energy has also gone down.
“In some places, it’s even cheaper to build a new solar plant than it is to continue to operate an existing coal plant,” he said.
Since people want to build renewable power plants anyway, the value of the renewable energy certificates may be shrinking, said Stephanie Lenhart, an expert on energy systems at Boise State University. This means that the additional value Idaho Power receives from selling the certificates may also disappear, eventually making them obsolete.
But if more people want their energy to be from renewable sources, this could drive the prices back up, Lenhart said.
While Otto thought the Green Power Program shows customers support clean energy, he and the Idaho Conservation League would like to move toward directly building more clean energy facilities. “It just sells to customers these renewable energy credits for projects that already exist in the world,” he said.
Constructing new renewable energy facilities is part of the long-term component of the city of Boise’s energy plan. In the short term, the city wants residents to participate in the Green Power Program.
In 2019, Idaho Power pledged to provide its customers with 100% clean energy by 2045 by investing in new clean energy sources. To deliver renewable energy to customers, though, the Idaho Public Utilities Commission will need to lift its requirement that Idaho Power sell all of its renewable energy certificates.
This pledge, Otto said, shows that “clean energy’s cheap, it’s reliable, and Idahoans want it.”
