"Green Tags" An Enron scheme to sell "Green Energy" Twice

Post lifted from American Wind Energy Association (1997)

Many of you have probably heard about Enron's "Green Tags" proposal, which would essentially allow the "greenness" of a resource to be sold separately from the power itself. The concept is essentially the Renewables Portfolio Standard without the requirement attached. In fact, AWEA and the other renewables industries recently made an almost identical proposal in California as a way to track and verify renewable energy claims in the absence of disclosure requirements, and as a way to add flexibility to the green market. So, my guess would be that most of the renewables industries would support the Green Tags concept. However, there are some in the environmental and renewable community who fundamentally oppose the notion of trading environmental "bads" and "goods." They think that if you want to market renewables, you should do business with them directly. Even those who agree on the concept may disagree about which resources deserve "green tags" and then we get into all of the issues I went over a moment ago. But I think it's a concept that deserves our serious attention, with the caveat that it would be an interim solution to a problem that is best solved through industry-wide disclosure requirements and a national renewables portfolio standard.

http://www.awea.org/policy/gm970530.html