St. Albert solar fans can learn how to use rooftop arrays to farm carbon credits at a free talk this week.
Solar Alberta is hosting a free online talk June 2 on how small-scale solar owners can make money by selling carbon credits.
Rooftop arrays lower utility bills and reduce the use of planet-warming fossil fuels, said Heather MacKenzie of Solar Alberta. Home and business owners could theoretically try and sell those emission reductions as carbon credits, but few do.
It’s a problem of bureaucracy, said Graham Harris of Firefly GHG Consulting and a speaker at this week’s talk. Carbon offsets require independent verification and audits before they can be sold to large companies looking to meet environmental goals, he explained. The eight-kilowatt system at his home could generate about $3,000 worth of carbon offsets over 10 years, for example, but it would cost him about $10,000 to put those credits on the market.
“Your system is too small to generate enough carbon reductions to pay for all the bureaucracy,” he said.
Harris’s company is one of a growing number of carbon offset aggregators looking to solve this problem. By rallying many megawatts of small wind and solar systems together, they hope to bring the carbon credits those systems generate to market. Alberta’s 8,000-odd domestic wind and solar installations could create about 7,800 tonnes of offsets a year, Harris estimated.
Carbon offset sales from rooftop arrays aren’t for everyone, MacKenzie explained. Some array owners will want to keep those offsets for themselves, while others will be disqualified from offset sales because they received government grants.
The talk runs from noon to 1:30 p.m. June 2 online. Visit solaralberta.ca to register.
