My Emmissions Exchange is a new market place that enables you to sell reductions you make in energy use as credits to people and organizations that are looking to offset their carbon footprint. The service works by tracking your energy bills and calculating any reduction in energy use that you manage to make. Savings that you do make can then be sold by My Emissions Exchange on your behalf or you also have the option of donating them to an organization of your choice.
The first thing to do when you sign up to the service is to set your baseline usage over the past 12 months. You enter your energy data manually on the site but once you do this you must ‘lock it in’, after which it can only be changed by MyEex staff. You will need to make copies of your energy bills and send them in to be verified. The process isn’t entirely fluid, but the verification of carbon credits is extremely important. False claims of carbon savings, e.g. when people tried to get paid for energy savings that would have happened anyway. This is the concept of additionality and is a challenge for all sellers of legitimate carbon credits.
Its also important that 12 months of data is used to create the baseline so that corrections can be made for seasonal variations. In other words, if you live in a cold climate you can’t claim you have reduced your energy in the summer just because you are using less heating than during the winter. In order to actually claim that an energy saving has been made, you need to demonstrate that your usage is lower in comparison to the same month from the previous year.
Much like the service EarthAid we recently reviewed, the next step is to go about reducing your energy usage. The site provides some tips and resources to enable you to do this. There is enough information to cover all the important basics which are where the most important savings can occur. They are also categorized and contain estimates of the amount of energy/monetary savings you can expect from them, which can help you prioritize your actions.
If you manage to achieve savings over the comparable month from the previous year, then comes the payoff. Once MyEEx verifies your savings they will certify and broker the trade. And how much can users stand to gain? Tami and Randy Wilson of Harrisburg, Pa received $17.50 for the metric ton of carbon dioxide that they saved, which would seem to compare reasonably favorably to market estimates. A recent study from the Environmental Protection Agency suggested prices between $13 and $26 indicating there should be demand for carbon credits available on the MyEEx marketplace. Of course, users also stand to benefit from reduced energy bills.
My Emissions Exchange is a for profit company and currently take 20% commission on trades. Project manager Paul Herrgesell believes the economic incentive is an important one, saying that MyEEx
“is a system that incentivizes you to save energy on a personal level and aligns with your economic interests”
Ensuring that energy savings are accurate and legitimate is a challenge that MyEEx will have to face. Verifying actual energy bills seems like a reasonable way to do this, but is still potentially vulnerable to some types of fraud. However, I don’t consider this to be in anyway insurmountable. There are many industries which have to cope with an inability to extensively audit at such a granular level. Instead, researching an appropriate quantifier is all that required. For example, if you can verify that 1 credit in 100 is fraudulent, then the market price for credits on the MyEEx exchange would just be 99% of the price on the worldwide carbon market.
Challenges aside, My Emissions Exchange is a very exciting prospect with the potential to be an industry disruptor. I’m really looking forward to seeing how the service develops and how the market at large reacts to what this company are doing.
EarthAid is a brand new system designed to help you monitor your energy usage and encourage you to reduce it. They provide a database of energy saving tips and users who carry these out successfully will receive points for the energy that they save. This applies not just to electricity use, but both water and gas as well. The service ties in with your online account for your utility providers so will track your energy use automatically. Points can be exchanged for rewards from the partner network that EarthAid has set up. Usefully, they also provide information on the various tax incentives that are applicable. For example, if one of the actions you are considering is purchasing a new 
The CFL Savings calculator is a very simple app that will allow you to calculate just how much money you can save by switching energy intensive incandescent bulbs for CFL ones. CFL bulbs represent a far more energy and money sensitive option over traditional incandescent bulbs. Choose how many bulbs you have and your location, which it uses to provide the cost per kWHr and it will calculate your savings. You can also enter the cost of each bulb and the amount of hours per day you use them. The app is great as it makes it clear what a no brainer it is to switch to CFL bulbs.
FindGreen has been described as Yelp for the environment. Quite simply it is a guide-book to all the great environmental and sustainable resources that surround you. The app auto locates you using GPS and with 60,000 listings makes it a breeze to find anything from yoga studios to bicycle shops or organic restaurants in your vicinity. Features include the ability to submit new listings and rate existing ones. The ‘green tip of the day’ function is also a very nice touch.
The name really says it all for this incredibly straight forward iPhone app. Quite simply, when you purchase this app for $0.99, one tree will be planted in the real world. The tree will be planted in one of 12 countries that are currently fighting deforestation. All of these countries are located in tropical regions where the climate benefits from tree planting are maximized. When you purchase a real tree, or one for a friend, the app will furnish you with a ‘virtual’ tree (as pictured) which you can display proudly on your Facebook page.
Another simple, but effective app. This app from Amazon allows you to read the books you have purchased for your Kindle, Amazon’s popular eBook reader. Whilst the small size of the iPhone doesn’t really provide an optimal interface for reading it can be useful for reading a few pages on the go. The app will sync the page that you are on with your Kindle, so it is easy to pick up just where you left off. eBooks are set to have a big future in reducing the amount of paper we use and tools like these are important for making that transition.
The idea behind this carbon tracker is that it will use the iPhone’s in-built GPS system to track your movements and use this to calculate your carbon footprint. The limitation here with the iPhone is that you cannot run applications in the background, so you will have to have this app open, or there will be a fair amount of data to enter manually. If you can get over this hurdle, it’s a great tool to help you reduce your carbon emissions. It allows you to set monthly goals and motivates you to keep them each time you open the app.
Concentrating solar power uses arrays of mirrors to direct sunlight onto a very specific target in order to heat it up to very high temperatures. This is then used as a heat source for a conventional power station (whereby steam drives a turbine which generates electricity). It’s a very simple concept that has been around for more than a century. However, it is far from a simple technology. It requires detailed design to produce a system that is efficient as possible and the manufacture of the huge curved mirrors is quite an engineering feat.
PhotoVoltaic, on the other hand, uses a flat film of semi-conducting material. This has a special property whereby light shining on it will induce an electrical current, which can then be channelled off into the electricity grid. This method directly transforms the incoming sunlight into electricity although, as always, there is a loss.
Solar Water Heaters are perhaps the simplest of all types of solar energy. The idea is simply to place a water tank/pipes in view of sunlight, usually on the roof, and then use this water for various heating functions in your house like showers and filling radiators. The most common user of Solar Water heating is Israel where it is estimated that they save over two million barrels of oil a year.
Another type of solar power is Solar Chimneys, where in effect you have a very large, thin greenhouse with a chimney in the middle. The air inside the greenhouse is heated by sunlight causing it to travel up the chimney (hot air rises, remember?). The hot air will drive a turbine in the chimney, or something similar, which can be used to generate an electrical current.
