So I don’t need solar panels or my own personal wind farm to be powered by clean renewable sources?

You sure don’t! To power your home with 100% clean renewable energy, click here. If you need to offset the carbon produced by other daily activities such as commuting, we’ve also got you covered! You might be asking, how could this possibly work? It’s all thanks to Renewable Energy Certificates.

Renewable Energy Certificates or RECs for short are best described by this definition from the Environmental Protection Agency: “A renewable energy certificate, or REC (pronounced: rěk), is a market-based instrument that represents the property rights to the environmental, social and other non-power attributes of renewable electricity generation. RECs are issued when one megawatt-hour (MWh) of electricity is generated and delivered to the electricity grid from a renewable energy resource.”

Credit: TerraPass

When we as consumers purchase RECs, we can claim the benefit of the green energy that was created by compensating the wind farm or green energy project responsible for creating the energy! This video from the EPA further explains how RECs function and why they’re important for the energy mix in the US.

I used this calculator to asses the carbon emissions from produced by my car for one year:

4.72 metric tons: 12000 miles in a USA 2012 Honda CROSSTOUR 4WD 3.5 Eng 6 Cyl Auto

So the next conversion was from 4.72 metric tons to pounds.

Now that I had how much my carbon my car produced in a year, I was ready to purchase offsets! I hit up TerraPass to see how much it was going to cost me and I was pleasantly surprised with how little it was!

Only $55 which more than covered the carbon I produced with my car for a whole year! Please hit me up if you’re looking for a way to calculate another carbon producing activity so I can help you offset it.

So now that the electricity at my house is green and the carbon from my other daily activities has been offset, what other ways can I support clean energy? Advocacy and investing in our renewable and sustainable future!


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