California Center for Sustainable Energy

Renewable energy programs offset greenhouse gases

When people think about reducing their carbon footprint, their thoughts go to ways to cut back on energy use and transportation. At CCSE our vision is to reduce our business impacts to zero or less by helping people utilize energy sources that don’t emit greenhouse gases.

CCSE specializes in facilitating carbon reductions in the San Diego region by administering programs that provide monetary incentives to individuals, businesses and large companies to use solar power and other renewable energy systems. During 2003 to 2008, CCSE also ran an energy efficiency shade tree program that gave away free trees to homeowners – more than 33,500 when it was all said and done.

Like most environmentally minded companies these days, CCSE is calculating and monitoring its carbon footprint. Climate Program Manager Andrea Cook profiled CCSE’s carbon offsets for sustainable energy programs in 2008 and found that five of CCSE’s incentive programs saved 128 times more greenhouse gas ( GHG) than was emitted by CCSE’s business activities. Other CCSE outreach activities, workshops and technical assistance programs help reduce carbon dioxide emissions as well, but their impacts are challenging to measure.

Before going into specifics, there is some background information that may help in understanding the figures. First, the standard reporting unit for GHGs is metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO₂e). While a U.S. ton is 2,000 pounds, a metric ton (also known as tonne) is 2,200 pounds. A CO₂e is a way to equate the warming effects of all GHGs, which include methane, sulfur hexafluoride and other gases that may not be abundant, but their impacts on the climate per ton are far greater than CO₂. The global warming potential of CO₂ is set at one, giving methane a CO₂e of 21 and sulfur hexafluoride a whopping 2,390. Knowing the GHG emission factor for a particular utility based on electricity delivered from fossil fuel combustion and other sources is equally important. This rather complex factor was used in CCSE’s analysis.

The bottom line is that during 2008, CCSE's programs offset a total of 21,285 metric tons of CO₂e through its five energy efficiency and renewable energy programs. That is equivalent to removing the annual GHG emissions from 3,884 average cars or 876 U.S. residents and to growing 782,000 trees for a year. CCSE’s business activities – commuting, flights, vehicles and power – were responsible for 163 metric tons of CO₂e - less than 1 percent of our programs' offsets.

CCSE’s Carbon Offset Report 2008 explains these results in greater detail. The programs responsible for the offsets are the ongoing California Solar Initiative, the Self-Generation Incentive Program, the Solar Water Heating Pilot Program, the Tax-Exempt Customer Incentive Program and the Cool Communities Shade Tree Program, which ended in late 2008.

There’s a lot of work to be done by CCSE and all of us to obtain the levels of GHG emission reductions called for by the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 that requires emissions be down to 1990 levels by 2020. The first important step is being aware of our carbon footprint and understanding how what we do affects us all. You can calculate your carbon footprint at www.carbonfootprint.com.

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