Don't choose renewables?

I just had to quickly share this little tidbit of inadvertant greenwashing with all of you. All of you being the very few greenies that actually sift through my bucket of word vomit. Thanks by the way. So, I was speaking with an energy consultant contact of mine in New York. He's a savvy industry guy and has been involved with large REC procurement deals since 2004. He pointed out something to me about a certain REC marketer that I'll choose not to allude to. He said that when they sell RECs they calculate the amount of carbon offset by the purchase by using the buyers local grid emission factor. So, this would suggest that living in West Virginia (a highly coal intensive state) would give you the opportunity to offset more carbon by purchasing RECs. Excuse me while I LOL. The logic this company (and most of the industry) uses to arrive in this remote locale is that when you buy a REC you displace your actual electricity usage with renewable energy. Now, this is possible - but not likely. Certainly not if you buy their "Nationwide" product. Nationwide means it can be sold to anyone in the nation and could come from anywhere in the nation. So, you could live in West Virginia and buy a "nationwide wind" product generated in Washington state. The carbon you are offsetting with this purchase is not the nearly 2 lbs/kWh that is the average in West Virginia, but the .35 lbs/kWh that is the average in Washington state. This is because you are displacing grid average generation IN WASHINGTON! So, on a dollars per ton of carbon dioxide offset or displaced if you pay $4.00/MWh for the REC thinking that you're offsetting 2000 lbs you believe that your paying about $4.40/tonne. In reality you have to buy 6 RECs to offset one tonne. That's $24 per tonne!!! So, if you have a 100,000 square foot facility with an electrical intensity of an average office space (say 10 kWh/sq.ft/yr) you probably consume about 1,000 MWh of electricity per year. Now, if you live in West Virginia that translates to roughly 1,000 tonnes of CO2. When you spend $4,000 to buy those 1,000 Washington RECs to make your operation "carbon neutral" you're actually falling considerably short. The carbon neutrality that you thought you were buying would actually cost $24,000 if the proper emission factors were taken into consideration. The moral of the story is - REC marketers know about electricity - but very little about CO2!!