I listened to a webex the other day regarding PG&E's Climate Smart program. This program allows customers to buy carbon offsets along with their utility bill.
The offsets cost consumers $0.00254/kWh and $0.06528/therm (i.e. not much, about $5/month). With 100% of these funds, PG&E purchases offsets via forest sequestration, methane capture and landfill gas projects which are granted via a bid process. The idea is customers buy permanent and "legitimate" offsets.
I'll sign up, because I like the idea of supporting these programs, and every little bit does indeed help.
However, it's really a very very little bit. Negligible, really.
So far, about 16,000 customers participate. Probably raising just enough funds to cover the costs of administration and marketing (the cost is shared by all ratepayers). The resulting carbon reduction will be small. And I wonder how much additional carbon is burned in the administration and marketing of the program in the first place? I mean the competitive bid process alone will probably require all kinds of people flying all over the place to evaluate projects, vendors go pitch their program, and of course there is the periodic trips to sites for monitoring purposes. And how much CO2 is released with every direct mail of 4-color glossy brochures direct mailed to potentially millions of customers? Not to mention the shipment of crappy squeeze balls or whatever trinkets are given away to market the program?
As long as China builds huge new coal-fired power plants every week, whatever voluntary programs we implement here in the US will make barely a dent in the overall problem.
This whole GHG problem will fix itself once hydrocarbons become unaffordable. I only hope that we survive and remain healthy until that day.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
3 comments:
It may be negligable, but every little bit helps. California utilities are trend setters and this is a good example. What if state PUCs start requiring this type of offering. It might be more successful than the renewable purchase options for retails customers over the past few years, or combined might lead to better results
It does seem like a smart program though.
Well my school is holding a raffle for people who can save the most amount of energy in their homes. In order to obtain these "coupons" or tickets, you must replace as many incandescent light bulbs and replace them with CFL's, which will save about 300 lbs of carbon per two CFL's installed, installing low flow showerheads, saving 350 lbs of carbon per showerhead, cleaning fridge coils every six months, saving 325 lbs per 6-month cleaning, and joining in the ClimateSmart program, which will save about 9,170 lbs of carbon emissions. They started this today by coming into the science classes. What got my attention about this raffle was the advertisement for the PG&E ClimateSmart program. I never knew this existed and maybe I'll try to help promote this myself at school.
Post a Comment