Every citizen under the Muscatine Power & Water umbrella has the choice to be powered with wind and solar instead of coal. At 25, 50, or 100% of your energy supplied with renewables for an additional penny per kilowatt hour, this program is quite affordable. The average household spends another $8/month for the Choose Green Program.
Click the button to sign up for yourself or use the calculator MPW provides so you can calculate just how much to expect your bills will be.
Currently Muscatine has very little renewable energy utilization. About 6% of the energy MPW produces is with solar or wind, the rest is with coal, mostly sourced from Powder River Basin in Wyoming. The small percentage of renewables utilized by MPW is due in part to the fact that so few customers opt into the pay for play program. If you would like to see Muscatine invest more into renewables in the future then you should opt into the 25% green level of the Choose Green Program at least. This has been the only tool MPW uses to determine public interest in renewables for Muscatine. Because the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) put out deadlines for power plants to become more efficient or else pay hefty fines, our power plants would require $40 million in upgrades in order to stay operational. This means, of course, that they are set for decommission and replacement. This makes now the perfect time for MPW to invest in a green future with the majority of our energy coming from renewables that can be built up before the end of the decade. However, that is not the direction that MPW is going. They are planning to build more solar in city limits along the Grandview Ave corridor but they estimate that this addition with take their 6% green energy today and double it to 12% by 2030. Barely scraping into the double digits of green energy production when the state sits around 60% renewable energy generation is laughable. But the reason why the amount is still going to be so low is because Muscatine citizens have not paid into the Choose Green Program. MPW states that the lack of interest in renewables, shown through the poor participation in the Choose Green Program, leads them to believe that the small solar field is all that its customers want. That’s why CLAM would love to see so much request for participation in the program that Muscatine Power & Water can’t keep up and they have to consider building more solar ad wind farms to meet demand. Please help spread the word about the program and opt into the lowest setting at least, to add more incentive to invest in renewables.
CLAM 