Earth Markets, LLC

THE BELIEF:
Earth Markets believes that individual consumers acting together as a community can bring about positive change in society.

THE INNOVATION:
Addressing the barriers in the residential energy efficiency sector – namely consumer inertia, lack of scale and lack of financing – by marrying grass-roots community organizing strategies and the latest research in behavioral economics as applied to energy efficiency with access to new financing strategies and markets. The power of communities, marketing and markets are all combined in one platform to provide real solutions to communities that want to take real action on energy efficiency. And because it is combined in one platform, it can be replicated again and again across communities.

HOW IT WORKS:
Community teams are recruited and trained to promote a variety of energy efficiency options to residents through community challenges. These “trusted messengers” are provided with robust toolkits and support to do the following:

1) Recruit residents into their community’s challenge with compelling messaging and marketing materials;

2) Take initial actions on energy efficiency in homes such as installing energy efficiency light bulbs to get residents on the “food chain” of sustainable energy usage;

3) Track the impact of all the actions taken – how much has been saved in energy costs and usage, how much greenhouse gas emissions have been avoided;

4) Provide ongoing feedback to individual residents and the community – through an online platform and displays within the community;

5) Go back to residents with additional actions to take to move them up the “food chain” of sustainable energy usage.

Earth Markets aggregates the energy savings achieved by participating communities and sells the environmental credits created by those savings into applicable environmental markets (such as energy savings certificate markets or forward capacity markets which place a value on demand savings). Earth Markets makes money on the sale of the environmental credits (these markets provide a stream of revenue over several years, typically), and also uses that revenue to provide energy efficiency technologies to residents at no or low cost.

• Kimberly Onsager wrote (3 years ago):

  Hello,
  
  I have you submitting to the Ignite Clean Energy competition. When you submitted to compete we were not accepting applications at the time. I will be having your team application deleted as it was before time and not complete. We would love you to compete with us so please visit our website www.ignitecleanenergy.com for further details. Right now we are accepting Student Team Applications. Professional Teams deadline is June 5.
  
  Thanks,
  Kimberly

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