Commodity, unbundled renewable energy credits, or RECs, (like the ones you are buying to join the EPA’s Green Power Partnership, get LEED points, or claim “100% renewable electricity”) do little or nothing to drive development of new renewable energy generation. This is both a good sign and an unfortunate truth. It’s a good sign as it shows large scale renewable electricity projects have reached a point where they make financial sense without requiring additional revenue from selling RECs. This is a significant achievement and demonstrates that the RECs sold over the last few decades served their purpose. Those RECs provided a mechanism through which governments, companies, NGOs, and individuals could subsidize renewable energy projects until such time as those projects could stand on their own. Now we are at that point and it is time to turn our collective attention, and influence, to the next horizon – ensuring the smaller-scale, distributed renewable electricity projects, that are critical to fully transitioning our grid off of fossil fuels, reach the point where they too are financially viable without REC funding. In this recording, we talk with Lush and the Climate Collaborative about crafting company renewable energy goals to optimize the match between strategy and maximized environmental impacts.

Matchmaker: How Company Goals Influence your Renewable Energy Path from Climate Collaborative on Vimeo.