This really looks interesting. Most carbon offset plans, where mainly the rich and green minded like the band in this Grist article , assuage their guilt at producing all that carbon GHG disaster. By buying carbon offsets. Seem pretty phony. The money supposedly goes to renewable energy projects. This really seems to!
Check out the list of projects here on the NativeEnergy site.
- Brubaker Family Dairy Farm Methane Project
- Wanner Family Dairy Farm Methane Project
- Hillcrest Saylor Family Dairy Farm Methane Project
- Farmer-Owned Distributed Wind
- Wray School District Wind Turbine
- Alex Little Soldier Wind Turbine (the first large-scale Native-owned and operated wind turbine in the country)
- Mandan, Hidatsa & Arikara Nation Demonstration Wind Turbine Project
- Toksook Bay Alaska Native Village Wind Turbines
- Kasigluk Alaska Native Village Wind Turbines
- Schrack Family Farm methane project
- Dovan Family Farm methane project
- Essex Junction Municipal Biogas Generator
- Stonyfield Farm Solar Array, the largest in New Hampshire
- Penn England Family Dairy Farm Methane Project
Check out the Stonyfield Farms manufacturing plant solar array. The very same organic dairy negotiating with struggling organic farmers. My suggestion included helping farmers become biogas producers to boost their revenue. That organic fertilizer byproduct is valuable too. Well NativeEnergy funds farm biogas too. Symbiosis. farm and energy policy go together.
Biogas backs up a renewable smart power grid with distributed generation on the farm feeding the grid when wind ebbs and the sun goes down.
I think this bears a close look, it might be a model that could use government subsidies wisely, efficiently, and honestly?. Take some tax breaks away from big oil and put some of the savings into paying the national debt and some into projects like this.
I think a utility company like Excel Energy that is building out a smart grid and using battery storage in conjunction with wind could work with an offset company like NativeEnergy.
Just one extra note on biogas that NativeEnergy might find helpful. By preventing chemical fertilizer use, building soil, and preventing fertilzer and manure run off from producing methane. Biogas digestion and it's organic fertilizer byproduct cancel GHG all the way from canceling natural gas to make ammonia fertilizer to keeping methane out of the atmosphere to reviving the soil as a carbon sink.
A way to calculate those GHG savings should be possible, if so it would prove that biogas offsets a lot more GHG than just the clean kwh produced for the grid.
