Green Options

You don’t have to get a credit check to buy electricity from a utility. Now you don’t need one to buy solar electricity either. A company in New Jersey is offering a solar PPA to homeowners to buy power off their roof with no credit check.

A new comprehensive study — The Impact of Wind Power Projects on Residential Property Values in the United States: A Multi-Site Hedonic Analysis — conclusively shows that property values are not harmed by wind turbines and wind power facilities.

The study, conducted by Lawrence Berkely National Laboratory shows that neither views of wind facilities nor proximity to wind facilities have any significant effect on property values.

The study examined “7,500 sales of single-family homes situated within 10 miles of 24 existing wind facilities in nine different U.S. states.”

I have a guilty concscience. You see, even though I aspire for literary greatness one day (hey, we all need dreams) most of my jobs have involved menial, manual labor. Right now, that is landscaping in a fancy-pants Connecticut town where most of the people have more money than free time.

But landscaping is a dirty, dirty business. My boss will sometimes go through a 100 gallons of gas in a week between his trucks, mowers, blowers, and trimmers. What’s more, although the EPA is imposing new regulations for small gasoline engines, they don’t take effect until 2012 (although California has already enacted its own standards). Engines under 50 horsepower can contribute significant smog emissions in some states because most of these mowers don’t even have basic catalytic converters, and run on mixed gas-oil fuel.

But there is an even better solution, one that for some landscaping companies seems only…natural. Natural gas, to be exact.