Calculate Your Carbon Footprint

Calculate Your Carbon Footprint

How much carbon are you eliminating from your carbon footprint with the switch to carbon-free electricity?

The topic of climate change has been front and center in recent weeks. With regards to all the news, we’re going back to the basics to remind our followers about one of our core founding principles – reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Greenhouse gases (GHGs) are gases that, when introduced into the atmosphere, trap heat energy that would otherwise be headed out to space. This is called the greenhouse effect and it is responsible for the warming climate.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the most well-known GHG, but there are others that are responsible for warming the planet as well. When doing GHG accounting, everything is done relative to CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and this is where SVCE’s carbon free electricity makes a big difference in reducing your carbon footprint.

Who is the authority on GHG emissions in the United States?

Answer: The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

The EPA is a federal agency in charge of protecting environmental and human health in the United States. The EPA provides the accepted values and procedures for doing GHG accounting which allows anyone to calculate their “carbon footprint”. Calculating these values is not complicated and can be a great way to get some perspective and see exactly how much we are contributing to climate change even on an individual basis.

This online tool from the EPA shows the household average of carbon emissions associated with electricity use (note that the tool uses the national average for calculating pounds of CO2 per kilowatt-hour). The tool also considers transportation and waste to calculate your household carbon footprint. With the switch to getting carbon free electricity from SVCE you can select 100% of your electricity as being “green,” which eliminates carbon emissions from electricity use, and significantly lowers your carbon footprint compared to the national average.

At Silicon Valley Clean Energy, we are committed to reducing the amount of carbon emissions associated with the generation of the electricity we supply. It’s for this reason we only buy electricity from carbon free sources like wind, solar and hydropower.

Is SVCE making a difference?

According to the numbers, we will be reducing carbon emissions from our customers’ electricity usage by about 1.2 billion pounds of CO2 every year, which is equivalent to taking more than 150,000 cars off the road!