Today we announced a very successful auction held for Verdant Energy. The full press release can be found here, but we wanted to give you some of the highlights:

Verdant, a leading Canadian power supplier, auctioned off Carbon Offsets, or “green credits” under the recently established Alberta Offset System.

By leveraging the World Energy platform and working with Baseline Emissions Management, Verdant was able to sell its green credits to an online community of buyers. Verdant had previous indications that the value for its credits would be less than its desired benchmark price, and were very satisfied with the outcome of the quick and profitable auction.

• As one of the largest regulated greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) markets in North America, Alberta is requiring large emitters to reduce emissions by 12% before March 31, 2008 or face financial penalties.
• To facilitate compliance, emitters have the option to pay into Alberta’s climate change Technology Fund for $15 per Tonne.
• World Energy conducted six separate auction tranches, culminating in more than 80 bids.
• Three of the eight bidders were awarded a total of 80,000 Tonnes, resulting in a significant savings over what they would have had to pay into the Technology Fund.

We would love to hear your comments concerning this pioneering event and we will keep you up to date on industry reactions throughout the rest of the week.

This has been a very busy week for the green exchange industry. Today we actually announced the industry’s first online auction for Verified Emissions Reductions (VERs). We won’t repeat all the info here, you can read the full release if you wish. The highlight of the auction:

• Sold 25,000 metric tons of verified emissions reductions across three vintages – 2006, 2007, 2008
• Sold for 29 percent over the established benchmark price

It is always exciting to see our World Green Exchange involved in these types of ‘firsts’, in the history of the exchange there have been other exciting moments including the State of Connecticut saving $18M, the first ever solar REC auction and others.

At the same time we are seeing more folks entering the ‘green exchange’ industry, which in our minds validates what we’ve been doing and the more then 700 million kWh of green power and RECs we’ve already seen traded on our exchange. The question is where is the industry headed and who will lead the pack?

Where do you see the exchange market for green energy and credits going? What will 2008 bring? Would love to hear your thoughts and compile them into another post.

-Rick