Green Mountain Power Highlights Environmentally Sustainable Initiatives Over the Past Year and Beyond

Colchester, VT - Green Mountain Power is rapidly becoming a leader in Vermont and beyond by positioning and encouraging environmental sustainability and renewable energy use and practices to its customers, community, and employees.

Highlights include:

Encouraging employees to reduce their own carbon footprint by purchasing fuel efficient vehicles. Eligible Green Mountain Power employees receive cash incentives for purchasing vehicles that have the best fuel economy on the market.

Green Mountain Power is carbon neutral in office and facility operations as well as in trucking and business travel – using bio-diesel fuel in trucking and hybrid vehicles in business travel.

The company publishes an annual sustainability report using the Global Reporting Initiative guidelines, available at www.greenmountainpower.com/about/commitment.html

In 2001, the company started renovations to improve energy efficiency and conservation in its offices and currently is working towards a LEEDS certification for a newly renovated Southern Vermont service center.

In 2002, Green Mountain Power became the first utility in the country to offer customers the option to offset their total home carbon emissions through the CoolHome program.

In the spring of 2007, Green Mountain Power launched the Choose2BGreen program that provides customers with a way to neutralize their carbon footprint through renewable power and home heating and driving offsets, a substantial enhancement of the CoolHome program.

The Choose2BGreen website and blog, www.choose2bgreen.com, details the three programs – GreenerGMP, CoolHome, and CoolDriver. GreenerGMP allows customers to purchase energy from certified renewable resources. CoolHome and CoolDriver provide customers with an option to offset their individual carbon footprint associated with heating their homes and driving their cars offered in partnership with NativeEnergy (www.nativeenergy.com), which are in turn used to finance renewable energy projects, including Vermont and Northeast-based methane and biomass projects.

Green Mountain Power’s six-megawatt wind power plant located in Searsburg, Vermont provides emission-free, renewable energy to over 1,500 Vermont households and serves as a premier education resource for wind generation in cold climates and environmentally sensitive regions.

Green Mountain Power (www.greenmountainpower.biz) is an electric utility owned by Northern New England Energy Corporation and transmits, distributes and sells electricity and utility construction services in the State of Vermont in a service territory with approximately one quarter of Vermont’s population. It serves approximately 92,000 customers.

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