Janice Park, Author at Bullfrog Power

FAQs Part 2

What is a REC?

REC stands for renewable energy certificate. RECs are the global standard for tracking how much renewable electricity is put on the grid, and one REC represents the environmental and social benefits of one megawatt-hour of renewable electricity. By purchasing RECs, you shrink your carbon footprint, directly support renewable energy generators, and create demand for even more green power.

What is CO₂e?

Where does Bullfrog Power’s green electricity come from?

Where does Bullfrog’s green natural gas come from?

Are you a utility? Can I buy my actual energy from you as well as the green energy?

Do I need any special equipment or wiring?

You do not need any special equipment, wiring or piping to switch to Bullfrog Power’s green electricity and/or green natural gas, nor are service calls to your location necessary to get you started. You continue to draw electricity from the electricity grid, or natural gas from the national natural gas pipeline system—just as you always have—and Bullfrog’s producers put renewable electricity or green natural gas onto the respective energy system on your behalf.

Do you monitor my electricity usage?

My province already uses clean energy. What can you offer me?

Many Canadian provinces generate power from large hydro dams and nuclear power plants. While they are emissions-free, these projects damage ecosystems and leave behind a legacy of radioactive waste. We source our green electricity exclusively from projects that meet Environment Canada’s EcoLogo standard for Sustainability for Renewable Low-Impact Electricity Products. That means that our sources, which include wind, solar, and low-impact hydro, are emissions-free and have limited impacts on ecosystems.

Where do my premiums go?

Your green energy premium goes towards three categories: paying renewable energy producers, investing in community-based green energy projects, and running Bullfrog's operations.

We use part of your fee to purchase renewable energy certificates (RECs) from the highest quality wind, solar, and low-impact hydro producers. One REC certifies that 1 MWh of renewable energy was produced and put onto the grid. We retire RECs on our customers’ behalf to ensure that the benefits of renewable energy are credited to them.
In addition to supporting grid-scale renewable energy generation, your premium also helps fund community-based green energy projects like solar panels for nonprofits, schools, and Indigenous communities.
The remainder of your fee goes towards administration and business development, including the annual green energy audit that verifies your purchase. We run our operations effectively so that we can remain a viable business, meet customer demand, advance the role of renewables, and develop new products to help our customers reduce emissions. We’re a certified B Corporation, which means our articles of incorporation reflect a responsibility to people, planet, and profit. Our public B Corporation assessment is available at the BLab website: https://bcorporation.net/directory/bullfrog-power

Can rented homes, apartments and condos go green with Bullfrog?

Of course! We want to provide green energy to everyone. Any facility can go green with Bullfrog Power, including homes that are owned, leased or shared. Remember, Bullfrog does not inject the green electricity directly into your home. With Bullfrog Power, you continue to draw electricity from the electricity grid – just as you always have. We ensure the energy going onto the systems on your behalf is from clean, renewable sources. Even if you are not billed for electricity directly (e.g., renters whose energy costs are absorbed in their rent), you can still sign up for Bullfrog Power’s green energy.

Do you install solar panels?

What if I want to cancel?

FAQs Part 1

Who is Bullfrog Power?

Is Bullfrog a charity?

What is Bullfrog's relationship to Less.ca?

How it works – Residential

How it Works

When you choose green energy with Bullfrog Power, you begin matching your energy consumption with 100% renewable electricity, natural gas, or fuel. Any location can be bullfrogpowered, including spaces that are owned, leased, or shared.

Environmental Groups Testimonials

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Watch a community project come to life

See how support from the bullfrogpowered community transformed an orca research station.

Intrepid Employee Discount Program

Intrepid has been choosing green energy with Bullfrog Power since 2008, displacing nearly 70 tonnes of CO₂e in that time. That’s equivalent to taking more than 15 cars off the road for a year, or 34 hectares of forest growing for a year.

We know that decarbonizing our energy system is essential to combatting climate change, and you can help by choosing high-quality green electricity and green natural gas for your home. Bullfrog puts renewable energy onto the grid on your behalf. Whether you rent or own your home, any dwelling can become bullfrogpowered—no need to change your wiring or install special equipment.

By bullfrogpowering your home, you’ll shrink your carbon footprint and help bring new renewable energy projects to the grid. You’ll also help fund community-based green energy projects like solar panels for schools, nonprofits, and Indigenous communities.

Limited-time offer: By August 31, 2024, sign up your home for green electricity and/or green natural gas and receive a $50 account credit. Make your selection below and use promo code INTREPID-EMP50.

2014 Kanaka Bar Indian Band Solar Project

Sign up for green energy

Green electricity

For your detached home

850 kWh of clean, renewable energy/month

$21.25/month

With this product, you’ll displace 1.6 tonnes of CO₂e per year. That’s equivalent to preventing 802 kg of coal from being burned!

Green electricity

For your townhouse or semi-detached home

650 kWh of clean, renewable energy/month

$16.25/month

With this product, you’ll displace 1.2 tonnes of CO₂e per year. That’s equivalent to preventing 601 kg of coal from being burned.

Green electricity

For your condo or apartment

450 kWh of clean, renewable energy/month

$11.25/month

With this product, you’ll displace 0.9 tonnes of CO₂e per year. That’s equivalent to preventing 450 kg of coal from being burned!

Green electricity and green natural gas

For your detached home

850 kWh and 220 m³ of clean, renewable energy/month

$62.45/month

With this product, you’ll displace 6.6 tonnes of CO₂e per year. That’s equivalent to preventing 3,309 kg of coal from being burned!

Green electricity and green natural gas

For your townhouse or semi-detached home

650 kWh and 160 m³ of clean, renewable energy/month

$46.15/month

With this product, you’ll displace 4.8 tonnes of CO₂e per year. That’s equivalent to preventing 2,406 kg of coal from being burned!

Green electricity and green natural gas

For your condo or apartment

450 kWh and 110 m³ of clean, renewable energy/month

$31.85/month

With this product, you’ll displace 3.4 tonnes of CO₂e per year. That’s equivalent to preventing 1,705 kg of coal from being burned!

How Bullfrog Power's green energy works

People holding up various everyday items

Go for Green! Practical advice for your company’s sustainability team

It’s no secret that bullfrogpowered businesses are sustainability leaders, with many of them having a dedicated green team that encourages emissions reductions, recycling, and much more. We asked our community to share their favourite environmental initiatives and their advice for other companies looking to start or level up their green team.

Start with a baseline

Muskoka Roastery Coffee Co. has a few key employees who captain their sustainability initiatives, from achieving B Corp certification to implementing a no-waste policy at their office and roasting facility. Thanks to the efforts of the entire team, Muskoka Roastery will achieve their zero-waste target by 2025 – driven largely by the conversion of all coffee bags to a recyclable alternative.

The Muskoka Roastery team stressed the importance of tracking key metrics, like waste, energy, and water, as a first step towards sustainability. Without a baseline, you won’t be able to measure and celebrate your progress.

Prioritize immediate impact

TAS notes that while distant net-zero goals are important, it’s equally important to look for everyday green opportunities. Their Impact team focuses on sustainability as well as social impact in the pursuit of developing mixed-income, low-carbon housing.

At TAS, they prioritize avoiding emissions from the beginning of the building development process, reducing the need for carbon offsets. At their flagship development in downtown Toronto, they diverted more than 92% of demolition waste. Two-thirds of that waste was repurposed on-site, reducing emissions from transportation, recycling, and new material production.

Start small and keep steady

Ecotrend Ecologics Ltd. considers their entire staff to be a green team working towards reducing unnecessary consumption. Over the past 13 years, they’ve meticulously tracked their energy use, waste, and transportation.

They’ve found that building sustainable habits can lead to big impacts. By identifying and implementing small changes, like replacing hand towels with efficient dryers or swapping paper for a sugar-based alternative, Ecotrend Ecologics has reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 44% compared to their base year.

Find strength in numbers

Devour Catering doesn’t have a formal green team, but that doesn’t stop them from incorporating sustainability into their decision-making. They’re working to source more produce, meat, and beverages from local vendors to cut down on transportation-related emissions and invest in the local food economy.

As a small business, Devour Catering finds that partnering with sustainability-focused organizations is a great way to have an impact without overextending their resources. Bullfrogpowering their operations is a simple and effective way to get started. They also work with partners to upcycle their used fryer oil into biofuel and offer reusable food containers to customers.

Focus on the customer experience

Staples Canada aims to make sustainable choices easier for their associates and their customers, such as by offering bullfrogpowered marketing collateral and other print materials to their solutionshop customers.

In 2012, Staples Canada’s sustainability team initiated a partnership with TerraCycle that allows customers to recycle writing instruments in stores. They’re the only Canadian retailer to do so, and they’ve recycled more than six million writing instruments to date!

To celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the partnership, the sustainability team held an event where associates helped create an art piece made of upcycled markers. The artwork hangs in the Staples Canada head office as a reminder to integrate sustainability into their workplace culture.

Keep learning and experimenting

Your Neighbourhood Credit Union (YNCU) has a green team made up of a cross-functional group of members. This year, the team switched individual waste bins for central waste and recycling, stopping about 300 plastic bags from going to landfill each week.

The green team likes to get creative. Recently, they organized a Build-A-Bike Challenge in all YNCU offices and branches. Participants built 23 children’s bikes and donated them to local Big Brothers Big Sisters chapters. The green team’s advice is to commit to ongoing learning and look to other organizations for unique ideas to try.

YNCU is also collaborating with other credit unions to encourage green energy adoption. Their Bullfrog Power partnership includes a Good Neighbour Co-operative Pricing Model that gives referred credit unions access to discounted rates.

All about organic waste diversion at Seacliff Energy

For some Ontarians, putting our food waste in the green bin is second nature. But there are many municipalities and buildings that don’t offer this service – an issue that the province’s organic waste diversion program hopes to address.

Ontario aims to reduce or recover 50-70% of its food waste by 2025, but currently has only a third of the infrastructure needed to accept the diverted waste.

Bullfrog Power’s parent company, Envest, owns and operates Seacliff Energy: an anaerobic digestor that can process up to 110,000 tonnes of organic waste each year. Set in Leamington, it has served municipalities including the City of Toronto, York Region, and Halton Region. Envest recently signed contracts to process organic waste from Windsor-Essex and Durham Region beginning in 2024.

When organic waste is treated as garbage and taken to landfill, it emits potent greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, that contribute to climate change. If the organic waste is taken to an anaerobic digestor instead, the gases it emits can be turned into renewable biogas that displaces fossil fuels.

“Anaerobic digestion is a closed-loop system where nothing goes to waste,” said Jason Moretto, President and CEO of Envest. The biogas produced in the Leamington facility is converted into renewable electricity for the Ontario grid and thermal energy for a nearby tomato greenhouse. The digestion process also produces nutrient-rich, pasteurized, and certified organic Seacliff Green fertilizer, which Envest distributes to local farmers.

If green bin collection isn’t available to you, composting is a great alternative that also lowers greenhouses gases and produces plant-friendly compost. There are even waste diversion options for homes and offices without outdoor space – at the Bullfrog office, we use an appliance to process our food waste and create compost for staff to take home!

Photo of youth working at the solar awning provided to Hope Blooms by Bullfrog Power's community-based green energy projects grant

Solar power energizes a Halifax neighbourhood

As summer drew to a close in Halifax’s Uniacke Square neighbourhood, the young agricultural entrepreneurs at Hope Blooms, a youth-driven registered charity, rushed to harvest the last of their produce before Hurricane Lee hit. This equity-deserving community is already facing the effects of climate change, and its youth are seizing the opportunity to change the course of the climate crisis.

At Hope Blooms, youth learn to grow organic food on 10,000 square feet of urban gardens and in a solar powered greenhouse that the bullfrogpowered community supported in 2015. The food they grow is sold at the subsidized Fair Food Farmer’s Market and used to manufacture fresh herb salad dressings. After graduating at 18, youth leave with an annual scholarship funded by salad dressing proceeds – as well as deep knowledge of sustainability and social entrepreneurship.

This year, Bullfrog Power donated $20,000 to help Hope Blooms add even more renewable energy to their operations in the form of two solar awnings. The awnings provide shade for picnic tables, free wifi, and electricity for charging phones, laptops, and ebikes. All bullfrogpowered customers contribute to initiatives like this one through our community projects program.

The solar awnings quickly became a meeting place, an educational tool, and a lifeline. Many community members who are insecurely housed or unhoused come every day to charge their devices. And when a tropical storm caused a three-day power outage in the spring, everyone could rely on solar energy to keep their phones going.

Uniacke Square is a public housing project that was built in part to accommodate the displaced residents of Africville, a primarily Black community that the City of Halifax destroyed in the 1960s. Having been promised a higher standard of living, Africville residents who were forcibly relocated to Uniacke Square instead encountered racism, unequal access to education and jobs, and a lack of social supports.

Racialized poverty persists in Halifax to this day, making many Uniacke Square residents particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts like rising food and energy prices. Hope Blooms is working to alleviate those immediate effects through subsidized produce and free charging, with a long-term goal of breaking the cycle of poverty altogether. For a community that has often been denied a say in where and how they live, the opportunity to engage with environmental stewardship and climate action has been transformative.

Jessie Jollymore, the Founder and Executive Director of Hope Blooms, notes that youth are much more likely to develop an interest in things that they can relate to. Her proof? When children grow kale, they’ll devour a kale Caesar salad. Renewable energy is another example. Students who would be bored by a textbook explanation of solar power might love to open up a solar awning’s battery to see how it works.

Hope Blooms hosts Green Labs that let students do just that, gaining hands-on experience with renewable energy during an 8-week program. They learn about environmental stewardship from the ground up, starting with soil health. Then, they’re invited to look at the renewable technology around them, including the solar awnings and off-grid greenhouse, to spark ideas for a more sustainable future. The first group of students built wind turbine models, solar dehydrators for their garden produce, and solar-powered aquaponics systems.

To Jessie, bringing cutting-edge renewable technology to historically marginalized neighbourhoods like Uniacke Square is as much about giving the community a voice as it is about emissions reductions. “We’ve been left out of conversations about climate change and climate action, and the solar awnings are a really important tool to involve our community in those conversations,” Jessie said. “Long-term, we hope that some of our youth will go into renewable energy careers.”

Celebrating what we accomplished together in 2023

Read Bullfrog Power's annual magazine, the Bullfrog Buzz, here:

Introduction

Author: Janice Park (page 3)

How it Works

Watch a community project come to life

Intrepid Employee Discount Program

Limited-time offer: By August 31, 2024, sign up your home for green electricity and/or green natural gas and receive a $50 account credit. Make your selection below and use promo code INTREPID-EMP50.

Sign up for green energy

Green electricity

For your detached home

$21.25/month

Green electricity

For your townhouse or semi-detached home

$16.25/month

Green electricity

For your condo or apartment

$11.25/month

Green electricity and green natural gas

For your detached home

$62.45/month

Green electricity and green natural gas

For your townhouse or semi-detached home

$46.15/month

Green electricity and green natural gas

For your condo or apartment

$31.85/month

How Bullfrog Power's green energy works

Read more community project stories