Photo by Truthout.org.
Cross-posted from ThinkProgress Green.
Ethical Electric, a new venture by progressive activist Tom Matzzie, aims to transform how Americans get power. It’s an electricity delivery company that will provide 100 percent renewable electricity to its members, while also mobilizing them on progressive energy and climate action.
In an interview with Sarah Laskow for GOOD, Matzzie describes how he began working on Ethical Electric when his father, who had spent his life downwind of a coal-fired power plant, died of cancer in 2010:
I’d been a supporter of addressing climate change and clean energy as a progressive, but it became much more personal. I didn’t want to spend any more of my money on dirty energy. I wanted to only support 100 percent clean energy.
Laskow explains that Ethical Electric will operate in deregulated electricity markets as a competitive retail electric provider in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, starting this year:
In deregulated electricity markets, delivering power — maintaining the power lines and the infrastructure that make up the grid — and selling power are two different businesses. If all goes as planned, Ethical Electric will sell power sourced from renewable energy projects to customers, starting this fall in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
As the Washington, D.C., director for MoveOn.org, Matzzie mobilized efforts against the Iraq war. He was also director of online organizing for the Kerry-Edwards campaign in 2004 and the online mobilization director at the AFL-CIO from 2000 to 2004.
