How can my business (bank) go Carbon Neutral?The President of our bank has asked me to research what it would take to "Go Green". We are a local bank in Missoula, MT. Our Main Branch energy consumption is as follows: Electric (kWh) 12720 (monthly average) Gas (Dkt) 15.407 (monthly average) I am curious as to what it would cost to... | |
One good step would be to get a combined heat and power cogeneration system. This is a system designed to power a single commercial building which runs usually on natural gas or hydrogen.
"Cogeneration (also combined heat and power, CHP) is the use of a heat engine or a power station to simultaneously generate both electricity and useful heat.
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CHP or a bottoming cycle captures the byproduct heat for domestic or industrial heating purposes
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Cogeneration is a thermodynamically efficient use of fuel. In separate production of electricity some energy must be rejected as waste heat, but in cogeneration this energy performs useful work"
A good source of information about this is Joseph Romm's "The Hype About Hydrogen", which devotes a chapter to hydrogen CHP technology. I've also provided a couple of useful links below.
If you want to become carbon neutral, I believe the only way to do that is to purchase carbon credits a.k.a carbon offsets. You calculate how much carbon dioxide your operations emit, then pay a company to invest in projects which will decrease overall carbon emissions by that same amount. For example, a project to plant trees or to build a solar power plant. You have to make sure the company you buy the credits from is reputable, because sometimes they'll invest in a project that never comes to fruition, and then you've just wasted your money. I've provided a link below to Wikipedia's entry on carbon credits.
Hope that helps. Good luck with your research.
Use of gases must be decreased, interior civil design of the bank must be changed in order to decrease heat-loss. If enough sun light is available then solar power driven heaters and heat radiators are good solutions.
hi there are offsetting companies that do this...
You will need to ask the offsetting company.....
I live in Australia so I wouldnt know for overseas but I included an Australian offsetting company.
the best way would be to observe other companies/businesses who are carbon neutral and copy their business model http://cnconstruction.co.uk/
