Don't overlook what you can do to halve your electricity usage, just by your habits around the house. If you can easily halve your electricity bill, then your own green power starts to look more affordable. Don't let a company tell you what you will "need" for an average house the size of yours. Look at your actual electricity usage, and whether you really need as much electricity as you are going through now.
Have you seen any of those "green challenge" TV shows, where they give ordinary families an indoor easy to read electricity meter, and then set them targets for a day, or a week?
Most families could get their usage down to 10% of their normal usage. Living with half their former usage was a piece of cake, with a few tricks and changed habits. From my own experience, setting some things up was a minor hassle, and the other changed habits were annoying for a week or so, but past that initial period my life didn't change at all, it was just a teeny different routine.
Change over to all energy efficient lights, lighting is your biggest electrical drain. Keep garden up-lighting for special occasions, alone or in company. Flick lights off when you leave an empty room. In future look for appliances with low Watt usage.
In winter, get everyone to put a nice woolly jumper and woolly socks on instead of turning on the heater. If people are still cold, THEN turn on the heater. You won't need it up as high with everyone in warm clothes.
Pedestal and ceiling fans use 40 times less electricity than A/C. Run them in summer, they do work to cool things down. If you still need it cooler, then running them with the A/C on will make the A/C much more effective and efficient, dropping the A/C bill significantly.
Pull your fridge out from the wall a little bit, so it gets some air flow behind it to disperse it's heat into. Wash all clothes in cold water, except for a separate load of clothes that really need hot water. All these things make a surprisingly huge difference.
Bonus points if you arrange your switches so you actually turn your electrical appliances OFF, instead of having them run on stand-by. For appliances that need to be reprogrammed every time they turn on, like a lot of modern TVs, have a flash memory stick for it, either a portable one, or buy the appliance with flash memory installed.
Edited, Jun 6th 2008 3:55am by Aripyanfar