Why aren't schools using Greenpower?

From: "Paul Taylor" <potaylor@bigpond.com>
Subject: Climate change action in schools
Q. Why aren't schools using Greenpower?
A. They can't afford it

Either this, and/or a lack of knowledge, must be the situation at most homes
since only 300,000 are on Greenpower. It is also in effect the answer given
by Howard and much of industry to avoid renewable energy.

So we have a big opportunity to address this myth, amongst others, in a
simple and practical way.

Lets first start with a household:
Ave electricity consumption = 8,600kWh (approx - chosen for illustration)
Free behavioural savings that can be made = 20%
Value of savings of 1720kWh = $240.
Electricity consumed after savings = 6880kWH
Cost of replacing w 100% accredited Greenpower (country energy) = $229/year.
Therefore a 20% behavioural change can be leveraged into a 100% change in
greenhouse gases from home electricity at no cost increase. The ave
household may be a bit different, and other provider's Greenpower can cost
more for bigger needs, but there are other ways to save energy costs such as
in transport etc, so my thesis is that any household can switch to
greenpower without needing more budget.

Part A:
By studying a school utility bill, their usage, their savings potential, and
the cost of commercial greenpower contracts, I believe we might find that a
school can switch to 100% greenpower w/o expanding their budget. Spreadsheet
and outline this.

Part B:
Design, or at least outline, a simple interactive climate change and Carbon
diet education module that shows how fossil fuel usage causes climate
change, why its a problem, and ways that we can personally reduce our carbon
usage (electricity savings, greenpower, transport, food, waste recycling,
water saving, embodied emissions etc) (The module can be elaborated or
simplified for secondary or primary levels.)

Part C:
Integrate both of above with initiatives that Dan and council are
undertaking and can promote (to high schools) such as energy monitoring
meters.

Part D:
Come up with a simple strategy to present the above 3 components to a school
headmaster/staff. Example, package above components behind an executive
summary. Take to enough schools to find one that would like to do a pilot
project.

Benefits:
Kids are educated
Kids, teachers and headmaster are together involved in reaching an exciting
target which quantum leaps to 100% elimination of ghgs from school
electrical usage.
A major greenhouse savings is manifested - if a school had a usage of
100,000kWh/yr, then ghgs saved is about 100 tons.
Attracts media attention
Proof of concept and show case for other schools
Kids and media take it into homes - more greenpower and more ghgs saved
Goes onto a website and can be a model nationwide for schools and homes,
(and businesses, councils and governments) to immediately get on with buying
clean energy with no additional cost
Breaks the myth that we can't act now for climate change because of costs.
(To rapidly expand renewable energy requires gov action and so on. The
argument keeps coming that it will cost. This is not true. For example the
Gov can save 8 billion by not subsidizing fossil fuel, which provides money
to bootstrap renewables at no societal cost if done properly - caring for
coal miners, coal industry has several paths to diversify and so on).

I am excited about the power of this approach.

Paul