Print Page E-mail Page Environment Feature Fading green Environmentally friendly power is a victim of the energy crisis By Cosmo Garvin Green Mountain s solar plant in Berkeley is no longer providing power for 60,000 customers.
Green power is dead.
Long live green power. But now that the deregulation experiment has unraveled, those companies that marketed green power have begun to leave the state, forced out by the uncertainty of California's unstable electricity market. The whole basis of how we were doing our pricing was gone. The final blow was dealt when Gov. Gray Davis signed legislation on Feb. 1 authorizing the Public Utilities Commission to forbid companies like Green Mountain to sign up new customers. Earlier this month, Green Mountain announced that they would pull out of California, leaving nearly 60,000 of their customers to purchase electricity from their local utilities, which use only a small amount of renewable energy in their mix.