Powerful choices

Some changes can be life-changing. Others, not so much.

Yesterday, I got an offer in the mail to change power suppliers. Dominion (a name that doesn't exactly give me warm fuzzies) is offering to provide electricity to Massachusetts residential customers at an 20% discount to NSTAR's residential basic service rate.

Hey, that actually sounds pretty good.

I guess that deregulation legislation is finally paying off. Almost 10 years later, but let's not pick nits here, some things just take time. It seems like we may actually have real competition here.

...except, that's not their regular rate, it's a special offer; you have to sign up by October 31st. And if that doesn't give you the sense that they want you to hurry up and act now! you might want to take note that they're only offering the rate to the first 25,000 customers who respond. Oh, and the rate only lasts through December 2006. (That's two months for those of you keeping track at home.)

Oh, and supposedly it owns one of the dirtiest power generation stations in the state. Company representatives have suggested that they've made efforts cleaned the place up, (kicking and screaming the whole way, but again, let's not pick nits) and switching to them will support "a company that is working to clean up the local environment through air quality improvements."

There's something to their argument -- it costs money to make those improvements, after all -- but at the moment, given the other issues I have with their offer, I think I'll let my inertia move me, and stay with being disgruntled about NSTAR.

It's too bad identifying another supplier wasn't more straightforward. I mean, the easy choice for me if I had it would be the green alternative from Mass Energy (who I use to purchase my heating oil), but they don't offer it to NSTAR customers.

Oh well.