Reporter Ben Elgin places the blame on the misuse of renewable energy credits (RECs) – a widely used but little understood tool championed by businesses, conservationists, and the US Environmental Protection Agency.
RECs allow renewable-energy developers to sell something beyond their green electricity: the right to claim that power's environmental footprint. Corporations buy the RECs, and some then say that the credits reduce their environmental footprint.
In theory, the purchases burnish the corporations’ environmental halos, and while providing enough revenue to help renewable energy producers to expand their operations. But according to Bloomberg, the going rate paid for RECs is merely a fraction of what renewable energy companies need to finance future growth.
Bloomberg interviewed 21 renewable energy developers for the extensive piece, all of whom appeared to agree that RECs aren’t adding green energy to the global power grid.
Among those the article quotes is Mark Isaacson, vice president of Miller Hydro Group in Lisbon Falls, Maine in the US.
“Nobody is going to make a decision to build more renewable energy based on selling voluntary credits,” Isaacson says. “RECs have not worked out like we thought they would. It has been a big disappointment.”
In the end, magazine says, RECs don't mean very much -- despite the “going green” boasts of the major corporations who buy them.
“It’s spreadsheet mumbo jumbo,” said University of Oregon advertising professor Kim Sheehan in the piece.
A founder of Greenwashing Index, which rates environmental claims, Sheehan added, “Companies show their emissions are reduced, but overall emissions to the environment aren’t changed” .
By way of example, Elgin points to US computer chip maker Intel, which bills itself as the largest US purchaser of green energy.
According to Intel, it cut its greenhouse gas emissions by more than 45 percent between fiscal years 2007 and 2009 with the help of RECs. However, Elgin found that if you take RECs out of the equation, Intel’s carbon emissions where actually reduced by a far more modest 13-percent.
The report is even harder on computer maker Dell, which claims to have gone carbon neutral in its operations in 2008, but whose carbon emissions, once RECs are removed from the equation, actually went up by four percent.
Elgin based his analysis on corporate filings with London-based Carbon Disclosure Project, which tracks corporate emissions.
Similarly, he found that computer networking giant Cisco, which had announced that it had cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent between 2007 and 2009 – far surpassing its goal of a 25 percent reduction by 2012 – was similarly disappointing, with its emissions actually climbing three percent during those years according to data it provided to the Carbon Disclosure Project.
Joseph Romm, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington and author of the Climate Progress blog, told Bloomberg, “Some companies are just trying to get a certain amount of PR credit while not transforming their company”.
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