Reducing the Footprint of Your Wedding
Renewable Energy Credits and Carbon Offsets
Reducing the Footprint of Your Wedding
The events surrounding a wedding, just like much of our everyday lives require the use of a significant amount of energy. Whether used by guests travelling by plane and by car, or the electricity used by the wedding, rehearsal dinner, and hotel facilities, energy is used in every aspect of a wedding. The gasoline for cars and planes and the electricity generated and sent through the grid is primarily (over 90%) from greenhouse gas emitting fossil fuels. Transportation and electricity production are MAJOR contributors to global climate change.
Since most of us aren’t able to get to every wedding by walking or riding our bike, and not every facility has solar panels on the roof to produce 100% of the electricity or a wind turbine out in the back, we have to find other ways to make energy consumption as part of a wedding more sustainable.
The primary tools we have to do enable individuals to support renewable energy projects and carbon reduction are known as Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) and Carbon Offsets or Voluntary Emissions Reductions (VERs). Now it just so happens that as Director of Resource Development at Renewable Choice Energy, a leading marketer of RECs and carbon offsets in the US, I lead our efforts to support these types of projects (so that’s why Mandy asked me write this!).
For more information about RECs and carbon offsets, how they work, and what the difference is between them, please visit http://www.renewablechoice.com/residential-why-it-works.html – our marketing people have put together a great series of diagrams and explanations that help make this all much clearer than I could type here.
Carbon offsets have their origin in the Kyoto Protocol signed in 1997 as the international community’s effort to stem anthropogenic (human produced) greenhouse gasses. The voluntary market standards and projects have their basis in the Kyoto Protocol. A carbon offset is measured in units of one metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent (there are six greenhouse gasses – it’s a lot easier to convert them all to their global warming potential based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s conversions).
The Renewable Energy Credit market is a U.S. based market that has developed into an important element of driving financial and other support for renewable energy development in the United States. One REC equals One Megawatt hour or one thousand kilowatt hours.
Lets take the example of Mandy’s wedding. For our purposes lets assume:
- That there are 300 people coming
- All 300 people are driving an average of 170 miles (distance from Atlanta to Macon).
- Of those 300 people, 100 of them are flying an average of 2,430 miles roundtrip (that’s my flight from Denver to Atlanta).
The impacts of that travel would be approximately:
- 51,000 miles driven emitting approximately 50,000 pounds of carbon dioxide
- 243,000 air miles flown emitting approximately 94,800 pounds of carbon dioxide
That’s a total of 144,800 pounds of carbon dioxide or 65.7 metric tons of CO2. That’s a lot of CO2 emissions for a single weekend!
On the electricity side, you have the electricity used in the hotels people stay in, at the facilities for the dinners and other events. There are a lot of different factors that go into how much electricity those buildings use like how old the building is, how efficient their HVAC and other systems are, whether they have compact fluorescent light bulbs or incandescent, how much they have the air conditioning turned up, etc.
A 100,000 square foot hotel in Macon, GA would:
- Consume approximately 1,770,000 killowatt hours per year, causing approximately 1,094 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.
- A three day weekend at the hotel (assuming all events occurred there), would use approximately:
- 14,548 killowat hours and emit approximately 9 metric tons of carbon dioxide.
- Purchasing 14,548 killowatt hours of Renewable Energy Credits from a wind, biomass, small hydro or other renewable facility (like the products we sell) would ensure that a commensurate amount of renewable energy went onto the grid to offset the power consumed that weekend.
Energy consumption is not typically something that we think about in our daily lives. We flip the switch and the lights come on, we fill up the tank or get on the plane and it goes. There are significant impacts to our energy consumption in the United States – we emit 25% of the world’s greenhouse gases yet account for only about 5% of the world’s population. Tackling our energy consumption by improving efficiency, reducing consumption, and aggressively developing renewable energy is one of the greatest challenges and opportunities in front of us today. Supporting a more sustainable, low carbon energy infrastructure is a contribution every individual can make, and what better time to start that than with a wedding?!?!
