Off-grid living
We’ve all heard of the ‘oldest profession’ but how about the ‘oldest energy emissions reduction’? That’s right, off-grid living is going mainstream:
The cost of building such a home is little different from that of building any other home, and with a range of energy sipping appliances such as refrigerators, hi-fis and even hairdryers now available, the forced austerity associated with off-grid living is also changing.
“You can have hot showers and a cold beer,” said Gamble. “You have no water bill, no sewer bill, no power bill and you can harvest something fresh from the greenhouse…why would you ever do anything else?”
It’s interesting to see the spectrum of off-grid advocates, ranging from enviro-conscious folks trying to live out their ideals in renewably powered communities to the die-hard survivalists who see the end of civilization as we know it around the corner. (“People will be unprepared,” says one off-grid grandma. “And we can imagine marauding hordes.”) Of course, both of these groups find their motivation in climate and energy related concerns.
In the developing world I’ve had the chance to see some of these off-grid innovations in action, used primarily out of necessity. Everything from small-scale solar panels on the roof of a mud hut in Tanzania to a micro-scale biodigester powering the satellite internet connection on a friend’s farm in Kenya. But you don’t need to go as far as Africa to see off-grid living in action. Just look at this house in TerraPass’ home town of San Francisco — micro-wind never looked to eco-trendy. On the TerraPass project team we’re always excited to see micro applications of the technologies we work with on a much larger scale. Maybe one of these days we’ll see one at our colleague Erin’s house.
Choose your own project type
Over the weekend, we rolled out the first version of a feature that lets you create a custom portfolio of offsets from project types of your choosing. Now when you purchase an offset from TerraPass, you can help direct our efforts to project types you like the most.
When you calculate your footprint and add an offset product to your shopping cart, just click the “change my portfolio” link and mix and match in 1,000 pound increments until you get the blend of clean energy, farm power and landfill gas capture that you want. You can also see a list of a our most current projects on our project feedback page.
(In a sign of our times, a blogger beat to us our own announcement, with Matt from Carbon Neutral Digest carrying the news on Friday. Hat tip to Matt.)
Let us know what you think in the comments, especially if you’ve used the feature when getting your Dad a TerraPass for Father’s Day.
Ninth project enters comment period
Four months ago, TerraPass became the first (and is still the only) carbon offset provider to invite the public to review projects before they are included in our portfolio. Now we offer up our ninth project for consideration, the Upper Rock Island County Landfill Gas to Energy facility.
This 3.95-megawatt gas-to-energy project at the landfill that serves communities in Rock Island County, Illinois reduces the amount of greenhouse gas (methane) that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere. The methane is destroyed predominantly by internal combustion engines to create clean energy, with an open flare as backup.
Check out the details and send our project team an email with your reactions.
As we approach double digit numbers of projects that have gone through the stakeholder comment period, we’re as jazzed as ever about the process. The march of progress in our industry is alive and well and we hope others will adopt this practice.
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