This may almost sound too good to be true: You do an energy efficiency project (a large-scale lighting upgrade, for instance), measure and verify the savings, and then in addition to the financial benefit of buying less energy, you could also SELL a certificate that indicates those savings to someone else for a profit. If you are in Connecticut, Nevada or Pennsylvania (and Massachusetts soon [probably]) you can do this now. It's known as a "white tag."
You may be familiar with the idea of "green tags" or RECs (renewable energy certificates). Utilities (or individual on-site generators, if they generate more renewable energy than total energy required to power their facility) can sell RECs showing that they have produced a measurable and verifiable quantity of renewable energy. Facility executives then can buy these RECs as a way to illustrate their own commitment to the environment and to get LEED points. Currently, RECs cost about $6 per 1 MWh (1 REC = 1 MWh of electricity). White tags work similarly, with the difference that one white tag certificate is 1 MWh of electricy avoided. And that tag - once the project has been certified through a combination of modeling and metering - can then be sold to a utility or another organization. The idea, of course, is that the cleanest energy is energy that's never used, says an organization called Sterling Planet, which has trademarked the white tag idea and can help organizations measure and verify their white tags, as well as connect buyers and sellers.
There are four ways to get white tags, according to Sterling Planet: Prescriptive (from retroits or replacement of existing equipment); Measured (from CHP or cogen projects); Design Method (using LEED standards); Modeled (from operational changes).
You are also probably familiar with the idea of Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) - that states (or sometimes individual utilities) must generate a certain percentage of their electricity from renewable sources by a certain date (i.e, Illinois: 25 percent by 2025). Well, similarly, there are nine states that now have Energy Efficiency Portfolio Standard (EEPS). Connecticut, for instance, requires that utilities make efficiency 4 percent of their power portfolio by 2010. But it's only those three states mentioned earlier that use white tags as the mechanism for complying with its EEPS.
I just learned about this idea, so I'd be interested to hear your take. Have you worked with white tags? If so, what were some of the challenges and lessons learned? If not, what do you think of the idea in general? Is it needless complication or another incentive to push energy efficiency even higher up the priority list?