The Brighter Planet Blog

Recently, we received the following message on our Facebook page from a Brighter Planet customer:

Where’s the wind??!!

After browsing the newly designed NativeEnergy.com, it appears they’ve replaced wind projects with trucking efficiency. If this is true, I’m more than a little disappointed. Given that the nature of the carbon offset market is inherently prone to greenwashing/inefficiencies, I look for the highest quality that I can. NE got my business first on this basis. I purchased wind over biogas being that the whole biogas enterprise just seems less “verifiable” and “additional” than a seemingly straightforward windmill that either produces KwHs or doesn’t. I was also glad to see that some windmills were being constructed in cooperation with First Nation peoples.

And now trucking efficiencies, which I just can’t seem get excited about:
*Additionality – I feel like many of these efficiencies will be made anyway when/if diesel returns to $5/gallon.
*Verification – Nowhere near as straightforward as a KwH-counting windmill.
*I feel like this distracts us from the need to reduce long-haul trucking trips. Yes, I know people need to make a living, but we can’t pretend to actually (un)change the climate without completely changing our economy. Is hauling a semitrailer of orange juice from Florida to Minnesota even close to sustainable, even if we increase fuel efficiency by 10%?

I have these semi-scientific reasons as well as probably some unscientific ones, but carbon offsetting is already on the “edge” of credibility, so I need to be extra sure. Unless I’m reading this wrong (and I invite someone to show/convince me otherwise), NE doesn’t seem to meet that anymore.

That said, I’ll still use my BP Visa, but I’m not quite as enthusiastic anymore.

(Former) NativeEnergy Customer,

Adam

Our response, which was a bit too long for a Facebook, below:

Adam, we share your concern for making sure that the projects you support make a material difference in the fight against climate change. That’s why we have our Project Selection Committee inspect all the projects we consider for our portfolio to make sure they meet our criteria of additionality, transparency, permanence, and high social value.

The trucks project you mention, along with various other projects listed on NativeEnergy’s website, are not actually a part of our portfolio. Since launching one year ago (November 29th was our first birthday!), we have selected an exclusive, high-quality blend of 11 wind projects and two methane abatement projects. We display all the projects our customers support on our project page. We’ll shortly be announcing our 2009 supply strategy, so stay tuned for updates and new projects.

A quick comment on wind versus methane. When it comes to assessing additionality, the difference may not be as clear-cut as it seems. Renewable energy is almost always subsidized and may be required by a state RPS, so figuring out whether a wind turbine is additional can sometimes be quite tricky. By contrast, creating offsets to sell is pretty much the only reason to invest in a methane digester.

As for verification… yes, it’s easy to measure how many kWh a wind turbine has produced. But calculating the emissions those kWh displaced requires using grid averages. And it’s also not always clear whether those grid averages (which people also use to calculate emissions from their electricity) properly account for RECs claimed or sold as offsets. With methane, all you need to do is measure the volume destroyed. With the right equipment you can directly measure the flow of methane to a burner. Or you can measure the kWh produced by burning methane, and calculate how much was burned using the energy content of the gas and efficiency of the generator.

Of course this isn’t to say we think methane projects are better than wind, or that methane is easy and wind is hard. Just that wind may be more complicated than it first appears, while methane’s unfamiliarity may make it seem more complicated than it is.

Thanks for using your Brighter Planet Visa, and please let us know if you have any other questions. We hope in the future we’ll be able to help you recover your initial enthusiasm!

-Ian
Staff Scientist, Brighter Planet