The promise of clean green, local and inexpensive electricity is a big enticement for counties and communities to form their own buying pools. One such buying pool is in Marin County.

Five years ago Marin County and most city governments formed Marin Clean Energy, or MCE. They offered what was said to be clean, green and local energy to residents. To promote such programs, state legislators made them opt-out programs. Meaning if you didn’t act to quit the program, MCE automatically replaced PG &E.

What KTVU found out was that many studies clearly show that forcing customers to opt out of something pretty much assures that most people do nothing -- especially if they are not well informed. In Marin, this important decision was relegated mostly to postcards that a lot of folks said looked like junk mail.

“We sent a postcard twice but we also sent a letter in an envelope. Two of the mailers were envelopes and what we found was that approach was a lot more effective in getting folks attention” said Marin Clean Energy CEO Dawn Weisz.

Novato resident Jim Phelps doesn’t think so.

“They say opting out is choice and all of these letters say no,” said Phelps.

Phelps is an independent electric design engineer and one of just twenty percent of customers who actually opted out.

“But I find so many people who don’t even know they’re in this thing…and they are very bright,” said Phelps.

Novato retiree Jim Botko, who also opted out, says many of his Marin neighbors and friends tried to opt out with little or no success, by either going on line or by phone.

“It was a total nightmare. I mean they were put on hold for twenty, thirty, forty minutes. Most of them would just hang up and call back later where the same thing happened or the phones were busied out…they couldn’t get through,” said Botko.

But Botko’s opt-out was short lived. “All of a sudden one day, I received a letter from Marin Clean Energy saying ‘Welcome,’” he said.

Like Botko, Emery Calo of Marshall also had to opt-out twice.

“I did call back to see if I had opted out and they did not have that I had not opted out. But I had the name of the woman I had spoken to and all of the information” said Calo.

Dawn Weisz  director of Marin Clean Energy explained “when we doing our mass enrollment in July, we did run into some glitches because of the high volume.” But she feels that consumers are well informed and “customers can still opt out”.

One surprising thing we found out was that several Marin city governments that forced its residents into Marin Clean Energy opted out and buy their power from PG&E.

If you are having issues with Marin Clean Energy, please send your comment to Newstips@KTVU.com.