A recent poll conducted in the St. Paul area has found that residents in four of the Midwestern states would dig deep into their pockets and pay more for utilities if it meant clean energy.
More than 1,600 people in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio were surveyed in January. According to the survey, 51 per cent of people stated they would swallow as much as $6 a month for electricity if it came from wind and solar energy. The survey cited 37 per cent of those populations would only fork over $2 to $4 while a mere 8 per cent could not stomach a price hike at all.
The Fairbank, Maslin, Mauklin & Metz poll, run jointly with Public Opinion Strategies of St. Paul, has a margin of error of 2.9 per cent. A survey such as this would likely have the support of Print companies, an industry very much concerned with energy consumption, recycling and operating in a ‘green’ environment.
Questions asked during the survey included what source of energy should be increased. Solar power took the top spot at 87 per cent, wind was next at 86 per cent and in third spot was natural gas.
The pollsters asked if energy consumers favored biomass energy, which most participants had not heard of. Once educated, i.e., explaining that biomass energy is a result of burning organic matter such as grass and wood chips, support was reported at 80 per cent.
With natural gas coming in at third, 60 per cent of respondents said they would not pay more for natural gas energy if the fuel was acquired by hydraulic fracking. This extraction technique involves high pressure blasting of water and other materials deep underground to release the gas from layers of shale. This method is currently experiencing deep controversy and gas prices have fallen accordingly.
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