Cow Power
Introduction to Cow Power
Founded as a not-for-profit, Cow Power’s sole purpose is to enable farmers to build economically viable AD systems throughout British Columbia that result in all eight environmental benefits mentioned above. To achieve this, Cow Power sells the environmental benefits created by AD systems to residential and commercial customers who purchase them for the electricity they consume.
While residential and commercial customers have their own reasons for signing up for Cow Power, such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions or supporting local farming, it is the combination of all environmental benefits that provide the motivation for most customers to participate in Cow Power.
How Cow Power works
For every kWh of electricity injected onto the grid by an AD system, one ‘environmental attribute’ is created. Each environmental attribute, which represents all of the environmental benefits that result from production of a kWh of electricity, is quantified and sold by Cow Power on behalf of the farmer. For example, if an AD system produces 100,000kWh a month, it also produces 100,000 environmental attributes a month for Cow Power to sell.
Residential and commercial customers create the demand for Cow Power by voluntarily signing on at www.cowpowerbc.com to purchase environmental attributes for 25%, 50%, or 100% of the electricity they consume. These attributes cost 4 cents each. As such, if a customer consumes 1,000kWh/month and signs-up to purchase Cow Power for 100% of their electricity, this would cost $40/month. While residential customers can sign-up for as little as one month, commercial customers must sign for at least three-years. This requirement is to provide the farmer with the certainty of demand needed to build the AD system.
Once sold, environmental attribute are ‘retired’ on behalf of the customer. This retirement ensures that the integrity of the purchase is protected, and that no-one else is able to make a claim of ownership or use the environmental attribute to permit or offset any pollution or emissions. Doing so ensures that these environmental benefits are not double counted by others.
If at any time there are insufficient environmental attributes to meet customer demand, Cow Power will deposit excess payments into the Anaerobic Digestion Development Fund. All payments deposited into this fund, which is overseen by an independent board, will provide incentives to enable development of new AD systems in British Columbia.
Cow Power will be launched at the 2012 Agri-energy Forum (part of the 2012 Pacific Agriculture Show).
Watch this space for more details.
