As environmentally laudable as Green Mountain’s products may be, there is a side to the business that is absent from the sales pitch.Photo: Tony CecalaLike many New Yorkers, Adam Holland first encountered Green Mountain Energy while shopping for groceries. It was June, and Holland was walking into the Park Slope Food Co-op, in Brooklyn, when a young man with a clipboard stopped him touting the company’s service. Green Mountain Energy could offer Holland’s family electricity from cleaner sources than Con Edison, Holland recalls the man saying, and they wouldn’t even have to change the way they paid their bills. He had a brochure, with a picture of a windmill on it.
Holland, who later recounted the episode on his blog, needed time to think it all over. When he got home and started Googling, he discovered something interesting: One of Green Mountain’s major shareholders at the time was BP, which had bought an 18.5 percent share of the company a decade earlier. Finding that out, at a time when the oil spill at one of BP’s wells in the Gulf of Mexico was in its third month, was enough to keep him away from Green Mountain, he said.
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