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The Pay As You Save (PAYS) concept that we at Construct Ireland have been promoting - the idea of providing up front financing for low energy refurbs and charging householders over time on their utility bills - has been gaining popularity, as I blogged about recently (here and here). 

Now the New York State Senate has passed a law that will enable homeowners to avail of energy upgrade loans that they can repay over time on their energy bills. It's a bit different to the PAYS concept we're promoting, which would involve a repayment tariff attached to a household bill rather than a loan attached to a individual bill-payer. But the general idea is the same. 

Richard Defendorf writes on GreenBuildingAdvisor.com: 

The Green Jobs initiative, which is designed to provide upfront financing for energy-efficiency retrofits to both homeowners and businesses, is similar to programs already offered by other jurisdictions, including municipalities in California, Colorado, and Virginia, and the city of Babylon, New York, on Long Island. Even in the U.K., the city of London is trying to address the energy inefficiencies in its aging housing stock by offering homeowners subsidies for weatherization improvements.

The initiative will be financed  through the sale of carbon emission credits under a local cap-and-trade initiative for power plants. 

Defendorf explained how the programme will work: 

The loans will be administered by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, which focuses primarily on the reduction of petroleum consumption but also on research into the environmental effects of energy consumption, the development of renewable resources, and other technology innovations. The loan limit for each residential customer is $13,000, and $26,000 for each business. Loan costs will be added to participants’ monthly energy bills, although the energy savings from each retrofit – which should reduce usage by 30% to 40% – is expected to be larger than the loan payment.

In the latest installment of his excellent Greenwash column, the Guardian's Fred Pearce asks whether a wind farm could result in more carbon emissions than a coal-fired power station. Referring to a proposed 187 square kilometre wind farm on the Shetland Islands - potentially the largest in Europe - Pearce writes:

More than half of the wind turbines in Scotland are on highland peat. This is not sensible. Scottish peat bogs hold three-quarters of all the carbon in British ecosystems – equivalent to around a century of emissions from fossil fuel burning.

Apart from water, peat bogs are largely composed of huge volumes of saturated, undecayed plants. A single hectare typically contains more than 5000 tonnes of carbon, ten times more than a typical hectare of forest. But any disturbance leads to lower water levels and to the peat drying, oxidising and releasing its carbon, says biochemist Mike Hall of the Cumbria Wildlife Trust.
The bog can decompose for hundreds of metres round every turbine, potentially releasing millions of tonnes of carbon. The process is slow, but frequently unstoppable, Hall says. So many wind farms may eventually emit more carbon than an equivalent coal-fired power station.

This poses the questions - considering so much talk of expanding wind power in Ireland has centred on our boggy west coast, and considering Bord Na Mona's plans to become a major player in the wind sector, has any analysis been carried out of the potential for wind farm development to release large quantities of carbon from Irish bogs? Will this be considered on a case-by-case basis for wind farms proposed in boggy areas?