From Larry West,
Your Guide to Environmental Issues.
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If you’re looking for ways to conserve energy and lower your carbon footprint, try asking the experts for help. Requesting a free home energy audit from your local utility is a good place to start.

Get a Free Home Energy Audit
Most public utilities will conduct home energy audits for their customers, free of charge. A home energy audit will tell you how much power your household uses and offer specific strategies to help you reduce your energy consumption.

A home energy audit can help the members of an average household find simple ways to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions by 1,000 pounds annually—and lower their utility bills in the process.

Does Your Utility Provide Green Power?
Another thing to ask your local utility is whether it offers green power, which is electricity generated using some type of renewable energy source such as wind power, hydropower, solar power, geothermal or biomass.

More than 600 utilities in 37 U.S. states offer green power as an option for their customers. As a result, more than 50 percent of retail energy customers in the United States now have the option of purchasing green power directly from their electricity supplier.

Check Your Green Power Options
If you want to know whether you have the option of purchasing green power from your utility, you can check the map at The Green Power Network, hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy.

If you don’t live in an area where green power is available and you still want to support the effort to make renewable energy a bigger part of the U.S. power supply, you can purchase renewable energy certificates (RECs), also called green tags, which encourage renewable energy investment and add more green power to the national power grid.