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Treehugger stumbled on that article... let's assemble some good stuff with real microwave details...

Canada's Natural Resource Department comes down pretty strongly in favor of microwaves for reheating and provides lots of info on alternatives to turning on the oven. (They don't deal with the energy/resources to produce the additional kitchen gadgets, though.)

Interesting little myth-busting article from TerraPass.

The FDA says microwaves are usually more energy efficient than ovens.

The Brits agree that microwaves are more efficient than ovens, citing a Brown University study and noting that energy use in British kitchens has fallen with the rise of the microwave. (The supply chain for frozen microwaveable dinners is, of course, another cup of (Earl Gray) tea.)

If you start comparing microwaves to other cooking devices, such as pressure cookers, electric skillets, and toaster ovens, then the evidence does become mixed and ambiguous. If you already have and love a toaster oven, you may gain nothing from a microwave.

for straight-up reheating, 90 seconds in the microwave beats 15 minutes in the oven any day. especially when the electricity comes from the local utility's "green power" option.

but for other kinds of cooking the microwave often just doesn't cut it.

I luckily have room for a toaster oven too - anything that doesn't get microwaved gets stuck in there. I would never reheat in the oven unless it was something like most of a lasagna for a bunch of people. Single servings can usually fit in the microwave.

I would like to see a post with statistics on how much energy it takes to deliver green energy. If you live in a city, chances are that your energy is not from the green source. The green source sells its energy to the pool of energy that is bought on the market.

But I wonder, if the sources of green energy are from natural resources such as wind or water, then these sources are probably in remote locations. So, how does that green energy get to the market? They must have to use some sort of power station to get it there. How are these power stations fueled?

Art, your skepticism is almost justified - the energy you consume is not from a specific source. The various North American grids are all interconnected so all sources work essentially together. When you pay for green power (actually when you pay for any power), you're paying the producers at power stations, wind farms, energy-from-waste facilities, central energy plants, etc. By electing to pay for 'green power' specifically, you funnel your money directly to the green producers and don't give money to the 'regular' producers. You also pay a fee to use capacity in the grid irrespective of what power you pay for.

As for how much power it takes to get green energy to the consumer, that's a factor of the distance between the generation point and the closest consumers (not necessarily the people paying the 'green' premium). Installation like the Hydro Quebec large hydro installations in northern Quebec will have some loss in the wires between those very remote generation sites and the consumers of their power in southern Quebec, New York and Vermont, but the losses are a necessary part of utilitizing a resource (the potential energy in water) that cannot be easily moved. Those losses are analyzed when generation sites are selected and are taken into account in the financial analysis and the design of the transmission system.

The transmission system consumes a little bit of the energy traveling through the system. The energy is consumed as the voltage is stepped up from generation (say 15kV) to transmisison (230 kV) and back to distribution and into your home (typically via 27.6 kV then to 120/240V). There's also energy required to operate the systems that protect the grid in the event of short circuits or failures.

The bottom line though, is that if you're paying for green power, your money goes to the green producers who are members of that particular green plan and not to the local coal plant that might be right down the street from you.