Somewhere in the past, I argued that for our electricity supply to become greener, more people needed to want to buy greener electricity. And for that to happen, companies needed to brand themselves and their product. That is a difficult problem considering the end product is the same and profits are driven almost entirely by keeping production costs low. There is however a proposal to improve the situation. The proposal to encourage people to pay for more expensive electricity requires that electricity companies be able to deliver extra products. We should let those companies deliver telephone, internet, and/or television programming.
Why should we do that? Well, there are a number of reasons. For one thing, it would be nice to have an extra option to avoid the cable company that we all probably hate. But the primary benefit is that the companies can bundle products. This will encourage brand building. It will increase the awareness of options. And the bundled products, which typically result in consumer savings, generate a little breathing room for someone to consider putting the savings toward cleaner power. Similarly, the promise of cheap, clean power can be used as a bargaining chip to draw customers away from the current providers that the customers probably want to get away from anyway.
