Isra-Mart srl: Carbon Credits Could Help Fund Maine’s Home Weatherization Efforts

Isra-Mart srl news:

The state of Maine today came a step closer to being able to make money from its home weatherization project. MaineHousing — formerly the Maine State Housing Authority — announced that its method for measuring the carbon savings that result from weatherizing a home, received initial approval from an independent third party validator. This means it will be possible to quantify the carbon credits created by the weatherization effort, and once final approval is granted, Maine will be able to generate revenue by selling them.

MaineHousing Director Dale McCormick says the revenue, in turn, will then be used to weatherize more homes. “We had a party,” she laughs. “We made history — it’s the first time in the world, we’re very proud.”

This is the first time anyone, anywhere has gotten this far in linking home weatherization to carbon credits — something McCormick describes as the Holy Grail of the carbon world, which will change the way housing and carbon markets interract.

“Up until now, the carbon world has gone after the low-hanging fruit, like big power plants in China and recovering the methane from big cattle feed lots in Nebraska and that kind of thing,” McCormick says. “But houses, 477,000 single-family homes in Maine, no one has even dared to tackle that because it’s so small — the savings you can get per house — compared to a feed lot in Nebraska.

Two tons per year per home — that’s the amount of carbon being saved by Maine’s weatherization program, says McCormick.

To prove that took two years of research and number-crunching, resulting in a 31-page document outlining the methodology. After that came five months of what McCormick describes as “back and forth” interaction between the third party validator and MaineHousing before it gained approval.

“Getting through the assessment process is no small achievement,” says Michael Carim, a senior environmental specialist at First Environment’s New York office who worked on verifying MaineHousing proposals. “We’re essentially taking a complete look at everything — there’s a lot of projects that don’t end up going anywhere.”

The document still awaits another signature, but McCormick says she’s confident the process can be completed by the fall.
“These are third-party independent vaildators looking at 31 pages of formulas and saying, ‘Yup, that formula is sound, their methodology is sound, the way they’re doing this is going to prove that the carbon is permanent and verifiable.’ Then, after that, we get to sell carbon.”

“It’s a significant step. They still have to go through the second approval or validation of their methodology, but it’s certainly an innovative approach for this particular kind of emission reduction,” says David Antonioli, chief executive of the Voluntary Carbon Standard Association, a non-profit which aims to provide a new global standard in the voluntary carbon trading market.

Antonioli says the organization sets out clear criteria under which projects like the MaineHousing one can be developed and carbon credits verified against.

“So we set out the rules against which people can develop their projects or their benchmarks or their approaches, and then they follow the procedues and the rules that we set out,” Antonioli says. “So for instance they have to use third party auditors or validators as verifiers, which is what Maine Housing Authority’s done in terms of selecting a validator to look at their methodology. So there’s a set of rules that we find that are important to make sure that the system has integrity.”

“To have another source of revenue to put to weatherizing all the homes in Maine, and half the businesses, by 2030, which is our goal, is just wonderful,” McCormick says.

McCormick says the project has been closely watched across the country by others who are interested in following Maine’s lead. “There’s no sense in everybody doing this right? So everybody’s anxiously waiting, and actually we just reached a tipping point on that. It’s very interesting, Tom, we get more and more calls about other states — California just called, Oregon, Wisconsin, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, like we’re too popular.”

It’s not possible to accurately estimate how much revenue the sale of carbon credits will generate because of market fluctuations, but MaineHousing says it expects to raise enough to make a significant contribution towards its long-term goal of weatherizing all the homes in the state within 20 years.