The grid contains energy from all sorts of sources. It's fungible. Electricity is bought and sold as a commodity, just like soybeans (commodities market) or the promise of future soybeans (futures market.)
As such, your house is still physically running off of mostly locally generated coal or natural gas. You pay Arcadia for their "green" energy, which somebody else is probably using anyway, and they work the bookkeeping out on the back end with your utility. However they go about making a profit, they can invest that into building more renewable energy resources - this has the effect of creating more demand for clean energy, filling that demand with dirty energy in the short term, and tilting the cost/benefit math for the utilities in favor of deploying more clean energy.
So, how does this lower my bill? The meter is going to measure the KW going through it without knowledge of whether those KWs came from a solar farm or a coal fired plant, and the power co is going to charge me the same price for the power that comes through the meter, regardless of it's source. Or, is this just some kind of "feel good" nonsense; "Oh, I feel good because all my electricity comes from renewable sources. I know that because I've got this cool app on my phone!" ?
intellectual/hipster/nihilist
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts." -Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan
DukeofNuke wrote: So, how does this lower my bill? The meter is going to measure the KW going through it without knowledge of whether those KWs came from a solar farm or a coal fired plant, and the power co is going to charge me the same price for the power that comes through the meter, regardless of it's source. Or, is this just some kind of "feel good" nonsense; "Oh, I feel good because all my electricity comes from renewable sources. I know that because I've got this cool app on my phone!" ?