Federal agencies have been padding their environmental stats with the cheap, carbon-heavy strategy of burning trash.
A REC represents a megawatt hour of renewable energy — enough electricity to power the average U.S. home for a little over a month. But the energy itself isn’t what’s being bought and sold. Instead, REC purchasers — usually companies — buy the right to take credit for green power they’re not actually using. As a result, they lower their carbon emissions — at least on paper — and can keep using the same old fossil fuel-powered electricity.
It wasn’t much, but it was easy money, so the Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County, which runs the incinerator, took the deal, and Barclay bought the RECs in bulk. Last year, he sold them for four times the original cost to his willing buyer: the United States government.biggest energy consumer in the country — has been meeting its mandate to move away from fossil fuels.
As the Florida incinerator RECs demonstrate, it looks on paper like a win-win. Federal agencies can say they’ve gotten greener, and renewable energy producers get a bit of extra money for energy they were already producing. But with no change to the amount of greenhouse gases warming the Earth, the only loser in the transaction is the climate.The federal government has enough buying power that it could lead the way to a broader, national transition to clean energy.signed by President George W.
While most were from wind power, more than a quarter of RECs purchased came from biomass — energy produced by burning natural materials like wood and mulch, which canBy filing dozens of Freedom of Information Act requests with federal agencies,from The Center for Investigative Reporting obtained many of the certificates the government uses to make its renewable energy claims, with details about the facilities where the RECs were produced.
at private companies because of the environmental impacts of burning non-natural materials like plastics. Crucially, the government would have to break its longstanding, frequent habit of choosing the cheapest way to look good on paper. That hasn’t happened yet. In fall 2022, nine months after Biden laid out his carbon-pollution-free plan, the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce and Energy, as well as NASA, the U.S. Air Force and the National Institutes of Health, spent at least $372,000 on hundreds of thousands of incinerator RECs.
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