What a morning!

Having fallen asleep during our third Netflix offering last night, I found myself awake this morning at something like 2:30am. So, I got up, because it's apparently worse to flop around in the bed awake than it is to get up and flop around in the rest of the world.

Yesterday, a representative from TXU called to get us to start a new plan with them because our old plan had expired. At the time of the call, I was in the middle of cleaning my office and had NO time to talk. Em had no time to talk, either, so we took their number. TXU is probably the biggest electricity provider in Texas.

With electricity rates on my mind as I awakened this morning, I spent several hours scouring sites like Power to Choose, Texas Electric Rate, Choose Energy, Save on Energy and finally settled on:
Save on Green Energy, which offers 100% renewable power.

February 12, 2009 SaveOnEnergy.com launched SaveOnGreenEnergy.com to market 100% renewable power, it said yesterday. The new site will mimic the firm's established site where some green power plans were already available but CEO Brent Moore told us yesterday that it makes more sense to market such deals separately. Consumers that want green power search for it and thus are likely to be drawn to a site with only those products. "We strongly believe in renewable energy efficiency and feel SaveOnGreenEnergy.com will be extremely well received by customers looking for the best in green and environmentally-aware products," said Moore. The new site launched yesterday with the firm starting an advertising blitz through the internet and more traditional mediums. Moore isn't sure if it will achieve the same volume as SaveOnEnergy.com -- that now has commercial offers in 20 states -- but he believes the green site will be a success. SaveOnGreenEnergy.com is starting in Texas where the parent firm has its roots and hopes to follow the original site on its path to other markets. The eventual goal is to run in every state with deregulated power and natural gas markets, said Moore. Firms with residential offers on the site include Green Mountain Energy, Gexa, TXU Energy, First Choice and Bounce Energy. The commercial retailers are the same as those on the firm's original site: TXU, Reliant, Mid American, Cirro Energy, Glacial Energy, Liberty Power, Star Tex and Gateway. Customers wanting 100% green power options usually pay a premium for them but Moore sees that changing. His firm hopes competition spurred by the website will help drive prices down as the firms offering green plans realize they can win more volume through the website if they do, he added. Moore saw that happen on the firm's main website.

We're gonna try Gexa. Their rates per Kwh were LESS by several cents than we were paying TXU to pollute.

So, I tried to get everything in order to acquire a switch to their services for 6 months, including faxing them a copy of Em's driver's license and our last electric bill to avoid paying the deposit fee.

We don't have a fax machine, but I was pretty sure this new Vista install included one, so I scanned the docs and the PC "talked" to the printer/scanner/copier just fine. I needed to hook the PC up to the phone line, so I did that, too, even though the DSL line goes above the phone line kindof like = . THAT brought down my PC.

I called Dave (my new son-in-law) maybe 3 times for help, and the "boot to the previous" option restored everything to WAY, WAY after I'd have thought it would. It went so far as to include the scanned docs right before the fax that blew everything away.

So, it looks like we're gonna try a new company with 100% wind energy at .125 kwh for 6 months ... as soon as we can find a fax machine that'll accommodate the docs I burned to disk.

Our service with TXU doesn't end until the next meter reading, anyway, and that won't be until maybe the middle of March.