Gerry Braun, former founding director of the Renewable Energy Center and active member of St Martin’s Care for God’s Creation shares his experiences of ‘going for zero’ in his home, church and working with the City of Davis. In a fascinating piece, he shares his learning from purchasing a PV system for his home, negotiating a solar electricity power purchase agreement for his church, and working with a few like-minded colleagues to advocate for applying net zero as a standard for a new residential development in the city.

The path to carbon neutrality starts with people, their vehicles, and their homes, businesses, schools and churches.  Individually, we have no moral standing to ask our governments to get behind changes we don’t take the trouble to make for ourselves where we can.”

Yet doing the right thing in his experience also makes economic sense: “For the lessons from my projects to be worth sharing, the projects needed to save money. Projects that don’t save money simply don’t provide broadly replicable experience. My premise, validated by the projects, is that it is easily possible, at least where I live, to make investments that have a good economic return and also add up to a strategy for carbon neutrality.”

Download the full article written for the Integrated Resources Network: Net Positive Electricity