No. Renewable Energy Certificates and Carbon Offsets are different. One way to think about it is that Carbon Offsets are greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions from projects that store or reduce carbon from the atmosphere. Carbon Offsets can be applied to many different sources of emissions. Renewable Energy Certificates are a claim to environmental benefits, including carbon, of producing electricity without emissions. Each unit of renewable energy delivered to the U.S. grid means that a non-renewable resource isn’t needed for that quantity of energy. RECs work to reduce the emissions of our electricity supply by displacing non-renewable sources of energy. This does not happen overnight, but over time a large enough amount of renewable energy can supplant and replace non-renewable energy. The question is how fast. Participation in Sustainable Choice is designed to accelerate the transition from non-renewable to renewable power.
To learn more, we recommend: Offsets and RECs: What’s the Difference? (epa.gov)
