Last month, Tami and Randy Wilson of Harrisburg, Pa., may well have become the first homeowners to ever sell a carbon credit they’d generated at home.  The family saved one metric ton of carbon by reducing their energy use and installing solar panels on their roof.

The deal, which garnered the Wilsons $17.20, was brokered by My Emissions Exchange, a carbon-credit aggregator in White Plains, and the credit was sold to Molten Metal Equipment Innovations, an equipment manufacturer in nearby Ohio, which bought it to offset its own emissions.

My Emissions Exchange, which earns a commission on the brokerage of the carbon credits, said it hopes to enroll a million households in its emissions reduction program.  Roughly 1,800 homeowners have registered since the company’s debut in September 2009.

“What we’re trying to do is to get enough people so we have a steady stream of credits,” said Paul Herrgesell, the company’s project manager.

Homes account for about one-sixth of total greenhouse gas emissions in the United States and are notorious energy hogs.  So the market might be ripe for such household-based emissions reductions schemes, said Mick Womersley, a climate policy expert at Unity College, in Unity, Me.

“If you can demonstrate verification, there’s certainly institutions and companies that want to buy these credits,” Mr. Womersley said.

In 2006, Mr. Womersley helped broker a deal in which Maine’s housing authority, Maine Housing, sold carbon reductions achieved through energy-efficiency retrofitting in the state’s low-income housing stock to Unity College to offset the college’s travel emissions.

Myemissionsexchange.com works by getting renters and owners — as well as any large building or small business that is billed through a single meter — to enter their utility and heating bills into its Web-enabled database.  Participants must upload or mail in their bills for verification.

“On the voluntary carbon market, the issue of quality is an important one,” Mr. Herrgesell said.  Current energy use and emissions are measured against those of the previous 12 months.

The voluntary carbon market topped $704 million in 2008, and just how much of a role individual households can play in it remains an open question.

Already, homeowners with solar panels play a small, but increasingly active part in markets for renewable energy credits in states like New Jersey, Maryland and Pennsylvania.

“The number of homeowners in our program is growing exponentially,” said Michael Winka, the director of the Office of Clean Energy at the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, which oversees homeowner sales of solar renewable energy credits in the state.  “The typical homeowner can make more than $3,200 a year,” Mr. Winka said.

The average participant at My Emissions Exchange, by comparison, is expected to earn just $40 to $60 a year.

But Mr. Herrgesell said the money saved from reduced energy use — $500 to $600 for some participants — is a strong incentive, despite the time required to enter data and upload utility bills to the company’s Web site.

And Mr. Womersley of Unity College said he thought even that is a minor hurdle for some potential participants. “I wouldn’t underestimate how much time young people are prepared to spend doing geeky stuff on computers,” he said.

Posted via email from proenergy’s posterous

January 29, 2010 – ProEnergy Consultants announced a new addition to their website today, a “Customer Comments” page located in the “About” section:

http://www.proenergyconsultants.com/customer-comments.php

We plan to expand this section over time with more customer quotes and images.

Posted via email from proenergy’s posterous

Portland pilot program tests on-bill payoff for energy efficiency improvement financing

Green For All, a national nonprofit focused on promoting green job opportunities for members of disadvantaged communities, has produced an inspiring short video about its partnership with a new retrofit financing program in Portland, Oregon.  Prominently featured in the video is Home Performance contractor Bernice Lopez-Dorsey of  H.E.L.P. Group Inc., an active member of Efficiency First.

Clean Energy Works Portland is a pilot program that gives homeowners access to low-interest energy improvement loans with payments appended to the homeowner’s energy bills over the 20-year term of the loan.  This innovative citywide collaboration leveraged ARRA seed money to establish a revolving loan fund, with a progressive Community Workforce Agreement in place to assure local hiring and employment opportunities for low-income and minority workers.

Watch the video here:

Five hundred homes are targeted during the initial pilot. The long-term goal of Clean Energy Works Portland is to retrofit 100,000 homes and create 10,000 green jobs, most of which will go to local workers in the Portland area.

Posted via email from proenergy’s posterous

Ice EnergyA Colorado company says it has designed a better rooftop air conditioning system that effectively stores electricity.

The Southern California Public Power Authority — a coalition of several public power agencies — and a seven-year-old Colorado company called Ice Energy have signed a contract to deploy rooftop units that use electricity at night, when demand is low, to make ice.  The ice is then used to cool buildings during the day.

The system effectively stores electricity made the night before, when generators are sitting idle, and then uses it to reduce electricity demand on hot afternoons, when the generating system is maxed out.

The coalition has signed on for 53 megawatts of storage, to be scattered around on rooftops in the power authority’s service territory.  The Los Angeles Department of Power and Water is the biggest of the group.

As with ordinary air conditioning systems, the ice is produced using a compressor.  However, because the ice is made at night, when air conditioning is in low demand, the electricity costs are comparatively low.

And unlike an ordinary air conditioner, which uses a good deal of power during the daytime to circulate fluid through a compressor to chill it, these units simply pump the fluid through the ice — a process that uses less electricity at times when demands on the grid are high.  “The total 24-hour efficiency improvement is 8 percent,” said Bill D. Carnahan, the executive director of the Southern California Public Power Authority.

Indeed, because of losses to friction, heat or other inefficiencies, most power storage systems never give back as much electricity as was deposited in them.  But this system actually reduces daytime demand by about 13 kilowatt-hours for every 12 kilowatt-hours deposited at night, the builders say.

Still, the ice system is not cheap; it costs about $2,070 per kilowatt of capacity.  In contrast, a utility could put in a generator, fired by natural gas, for about half that price.

But the public power authority thinks the ice storage units will work out to be less expensive, because they will use electricity made from cheaper sources.

And they will be easier to install.  Unlike an electric generator, “you don’t have to site it, permit it, run gas to it and connect it to the grid,” said Mr. Carnahan.

Christopher Hickman, a vice president of Ice Energy, said that his product would replace gas generators that might run only 5 percent of the hours in a year. The ice storage units, he said, will operate profitably 12 to 15 percent of the hours in a year.

http://www.proenergymd.com

Posted via email from proenergy’s posterous

A California family of four could receive more than $1,000 every year if a proposal floated by state officials is approved.

The recommendation, adopted by the state Economic and Allocation Advisory Committee last week, would send money from the state’s new cap-and-trade program back to residents.

But the group could not decide if the money should be distributed in checks, tax breaks or tax abatements.

The system would help the state meet its ambitious goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by 2020.

Under California’s cap-and-trade system, which begins in 2012, polluters would buy carbon allowances at auction.  Polluters would have a cap, or limit, on the amount of greenhouse gases they emit every year.  If a company wanted to emit more, it would have to buy an allowance in the auction.

The state projects it will earn from $2 billion to $22 billion annually from 2012 to 2020.

The committee recommends that 75 percent of the auction’s proceeds be distributed to residents; the rest would be used for the development of innovative technologies, energy efficiency and alternative fuels, said Stanley Young, a spokesman for the California Air Resources Board, which is designing the state’s cap-and-trade program.

The proposal will be considered for the Board’s draft of the cap-and-trade proposal due in April, said BreAnda Northcutt, spokeswoman for the California Environmental Protection Agency.

A cap-and-trade program must be adopted by Jan. 1, 2011.

Posted via email from proenergy’s posterous

For the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service coming up on Monday, ReCharge America is encouraging folks to create their own day of service in their home or their community by picking some of the low hanging fruit of home energy efficiency.  ReCharge America is a nationwide volunteer service founded in 2009 by Clean Tech for Obama (for which Energy Circle founder Peter Troast served as co-chair for Maine), and ecoAmerica, as a response to President Obama’s call to service.

In keeping with President Obama’s service initiative, as well as….(continued here)

http://www.proenergymd.com

Posted via email from proenergy’s posterous

It’s been more than two years since Google’s last big move to enter a government-regulated offline business.  They offered some $4.6B for wireless spectrum in an auction in 2008, but it seemed that the multi-billion bid was merely a ploy to get some of their demands for the spectrum met.

But that’s not quite the case with Google’s recent application to buy and sell power “much like utility companies do,” according to the New York Times.  Google told the Federal Energy Regulation Commission that they need this capability to support their power-hungry facilities with more renewable energy sources.  Google created a subsidiary last month, Google Energy, to handle this.

As the NYT points out, this isn’t Google’s first look at energy:

This is hardly Google’s first foray into the energy world.  Over the years, Google has invested in renewable energy projects through its philanthropic and venture capital units.  It has also embarked on a number of engineering projects and partnerships to, for example, advance plug-in hybrids and offer tools to measure home electricity usage.  And it has an ambitious goal to help develop renewable energy that is cheaper than coal.  Bill Weihl, Google’s green energy czar, discussed many of those initiatives and goals in a lengthy interview with The New York Times published on Thursday.

Google insists that they’re not getting into the market to trade energy, but if their application is approved, they could sell any surplus energy they own.

What do you think? Is this just Google’s carbon-neutrality quest, or a back-door entry into another market?

http://www.proenergymd.com/commercial-Power.php

Posted via email from proenergy’s posterous