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There is Green Power surging through colleges, universities, and even Fortune 500 companies this summer.  But do you know exactly what it is, and how your business can become part of this movement?  The following is straight from the EPA’s site, which has a plethora of information, to help you better understand where all the energy is coming from and what your business can do to help:

The Green Power Partnership is a voluntary program that encourages organizations to buy green power as a way to reduce the environmental impacts associated with purchased electricity use. The Partnership currently has hundreds of Partner organizations voluntarily purchasing billions of kilowatt-hours of green power annually.

Green Power Defined

Renewable energy and green power – what’s the difference?

In short, not all sources of power generation have the same environmental benefits and costs.

Green power is a subset of renewable energy (Graph 1) and represents those renewable energy resources and technologies that provide the highest environmental benefit. EPA defines green power as electricity produced from solar, wind, geothermal, biogas, biomass, and low-impact small hydroelectric sources. Customers often buy green power for avoided environmental impacts and its greenhouse gas reduction benefits.

Green power sources produce electricity with an environmental profile superior to conventional power technologies and produce no anthropogenic (human caused) greenhouse gas emissions. EPA requires that green power sources must also have been built since the beginning of the voluntary market (1/1/1997) in order to support “new” renewable energy development.

Renewable energy includes resources that rely on fuel sources that restore themselves over short periods of time and do not diminish. Such fuel sources include the sun, wind, moving water, organic plant and waste material (biomass), and the earth’s heat (geothermal). Although the impacts are small, some renewable energy technologies have an impact on the environment. For example, large hydroelectric resources can have environmental trade-offs associated with issues such as fisheries and land use.

Conventional power includes the combustion of fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, and oil) and the nuclear fission of uranium. Fossil fuels have environmental costs from mining, drilling, or extraction, and emit greenhouse gases and air pollution during combustion. Although nuclear power generation emits no greenhouse gases during power generation, it does require mining, extraction, and long-term radioactive waste storage.

Type of emissions

Anthropogenic emissions are produced as a result of human activity that unnaturally releases CO₂ emissions into the atmosphere. One of the largest sources of anthropogenic CO₂ emissions is the combustion of fossil fuels or fossil fuel-based products to produce electricity.

Biogenic emissions, in contrast, result from natural biological processes, such as the decomposition or combustion of vegetative matter. Biogenic emissions are part of a closed carbon loop. Biogenic CO₂ emissions are balanced by the natural uptake of CO₂ by growing vegetation, resulting in a net zero contribution of CO₂ emissions to the atmosphere. Examples of biogenic emission sources include burning vegetation (biomass) to produce electricity or using plant-based biofuels for transport.

The Green Power Partnership is a voluntary program that supports the organizational procurement of green power by offering expert advice, technical support, tools and resources. Partnering with EPA can help your organization lower the transaction costs of buying green power, reduce its carbon footprint, and communicate its leadership to key stakeholders. Green power is electricity produced from a subset of renewable resources, such as solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, and low-impact hydro. Buying green power is one of the easiest and most effective ways to improve your organization’s environmental performance.

Learn how to your business can become part of the EPA’s Green Power Partnership here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 at 8:28 am and is filed under Green Growth, Smart Energy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.