We caught up with Brian Hayduk to discuss energy management consulting and how it can help businesses achieve their green goals.
What does Juice Energy do and what is your role in the company?
I'm the president and co-founder of Juice Energy. We are electricity cost managers and advisers to commercial-industrial customers, non-profit organizations, and other organizations. We help clients figure out when it's the right time to buy electricity and what the right rate is. We're also a licensed buyer of electricity which means that we can actually supply electricity. So, we help clients choose the best product and structure, buy that electricity, and deliver that electricity into their system.
What do you do as far as sustainability goes?
If a client has a sustainable goal—such as reducing their carbon footprint—we will help them all the way through that process. We work with them on setting a goal, examining what similar organizations have done, choosing the right plan of action, etc. Basically, we help them pick a goal and establish a base line. We'll help folks figure out what their carbon footprint is and track it over time. We help them determine the most cost effective and efficient way to reduce their carbon footprint, or to have green power.
Beyond cost, we also make sure that each organization makes choices that are of the highest integrity so that their claims will hold up if they make a public statement about their plans or actions. When company makes a statement about it has done from the standpoint of sustainability, that statement needs to be ironclad. We make sure that everything we do for our clients is consistent with what they are trying to do from a brand perspective and a statement perspective. This extends all the way through helping to market it.
Once these folks have done something and they want to tell their stake holders, we help them tell their story appropriately. So, we don't install equipment. We're consultants, but we are actually electricity suppliers licensed by EPSCO. We buy electricity in the wholesale market and deliver it into the power pool. If someone says, "I want to buy electricity," we buy that electricity from a power plant or a wind farm, but we don't physically do things on site.
How do energy credits work?
If you were to build a wind farm, you would have two commodities that you would have to sell, and they are separate and distinct, tradable commodities. One of them is the electricity, and you would also have what's called a renewable energy credit. The renewable energy credit is effectively everything that is green, including all of the environmental attributes associated with that energy plant being more friendly towards the environment. It is actually a separate and distinct commodity that's sold in the market place.
When someone buys green power, for every mega watt hour or kilo watt hour of electricity that they buy, they have to buy an equivalent amount of mega watt hours or kilo watt hours of renewable energy credits which offset of the electricity that they bought. You overlay a renewable energy credit on top of your kilo watt hour, and you've got green power. The reason you can separate the two is because carbon reduction is transportable; it's not a local issue like acid rain. If I pull out carbon from Texas or California, it's no different than if I picked it out from Paris or New York. You're removing carbon form the atmosphere. That's the ingenious part of what the renewable energy credit market was able to do.
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