Buying Carbon Offsets/RECs Or Not

[rsh]

Do you buy carbon offsets or RECs? If so, what do you look for? If not, why not?

[gthurnball]

Have you checked out envirocitizen's offsets? They are very affordable.

[tysookal]

Yes, they are quite reasonable.

[kymsolaris]

Talk about win win. Here is article about an Indian Railway company that is using the money earned from carbon credits to buy CFL for its employees.

Railways makes the right 'carbon' moves

MUMBAI: Railways is the latest entrant to take steps to cut down energy consumption and earn carbon credits. Recently, the ministry of railways has awarded a contract through competitive bidding for supply of compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) free of cost to railway employees residing in railway colonies.

The cost of CFLs will be recovered through carbon credits to be earned from the project. The department also stands to earn 3% carbon credits that accrue from the project.

Under the project each railway household will get up to a maximum of 4 CFLs in exchange for 4 incandescent lamps (ICL). A 60 watt ICL will be replaced by 14 watt CFL and 100 watt ICL by 20 watt CFL.

Besides, the department has started trials with bio-diesel for diesel locomotives and CNG mixed with high speed diesel in Diesel Multiple Units (DMUs). It is also trying to adopt state-of-art high efficiency insulated gate bipolar electrical multiple units (EMUs) to recover energy during braking. Besides reducing carbon emission it also cut down electricity consumption.

According to railways, a pilot wind mill project of 10.5 MW capacity has been successfully executed in Tamil Nadu for supply of wind generated electricity to Integral Coach Factory (ICF) at Chennai.