The deal is very similar to how many car manufacturers already offer satellite radio, or how some have offered a year’s worth or more of free gasoline. “It works out to 7.5 megawatt-hours of electricity over the course of the two years,” he said. I asked if this is an exclusive deal with GM, or whether Bullfrog is able to make a similar offer with other EV manufacturers. “It takes a while to put a program like this together, so we don’t anticipate anyone else coming aboard within the next year. At some point in time, we would hope that all EV manufacturers would begin offering it.”

This is the right path for Bullfrog, which has developed a strong brand in Canada. Like its electricity business, Bullfrog doesn’t produce green natural gas itself. It partners with a developer that, for example, extracts landfill gas, cleans it up, and injects it into a natural gas pipeline. As I understand it Bullfrog purchases that gas (and, more importantly, the green credits associated with it) and resells it. It doesn’t sell it directly to the customer, because all the gas is mixed into the larger network. Rather, it’s treated more like a direct offset to whatever natural gas that customer consumes. Bullfrog then retires those green credits so they can’t be sold through the market. If I, as a Bullfrog customer, consume X amount of natural gas in a given month, what I pay makes sure that X amount of green natural gas gets injected into the gas system to offset my consumption and that all associated credits are taken off the market.

This approach doesn’t sit well with everyone, and indeed, it’s a mysterious process to most people. It’s unclear to me, for example, how much new production (in the case of green natural gas) or new generation (in the case of green electricity) Bullfrog is stimulating and that would otherwise not be built. That is, is this simply a packaging and reselling of existing production/generation on the market? But even if that’s the case, for some people it doesn’t matter. Some consumers will pay a premium to make sure, out of principle, that all of the energy they use is green — that is, none of it comes from nuclear or fossil fuels. Obviously, there’s enough demand in the market for Bullfrog to make a business of it. This is encouraging.

But that’s just part of the story for me. By entering the business, Bullfrog will do what it did for green electricity: raise awareness of a green alternative, stimulate talk of clean options, influence public policy and debate, and break new ground so that it’s easier for others in the market to follow.

Today, Bullfrog is announcing plans to take the same model to the business of selling natural gas, starting with a pilot project that will see it deliver a “green” natural gas product to Kraft Canada, which is purchasing enough of it — along with green electricity — to cover the baking and packaging of its Dad’s line of oatmeal cookies.  Kraft will print a “Bullfrog-powered” logo on the front of 15 million boxes annually to promote the low-carbon content of its cookies to customers.

There are two interesting angles here. One is that Kraft will be one of the first major food brands to promote the fact that the making of a particular product was carbon-neutral or better. This is presumably to boost the appeal to consumers who are concerned about climate change. And why not go in this direction? Food manufacturers and retailers already do well selling products that are “organic” or “free range” or have “zero transfats” or come from local farmers. The kind of energy used to make a product should also be part of the equation, and perhaps we’ll see this trend taking off — which is exactly what Bullfrog is hoping to kickstart.

The other angle is the impact this will have on the natural gas market. Bullfrog is getting its green gas product from a company in Quebec called EBI Energie, which has a landfill-gas facility nearly Montreal that injects into a nearby TransCanada Pipeline. The injection of biogas or landfill gas into natural gas pipelines is done throughout Europe and parts of the United States, but it’s a relatively new thing here in Canada. EBI is one of the few doing it, and that’s because considerable expense must go into extracting and conditioning the gas to the point of being pipeline quality before injection. For projects to be economical, they must be of a certain scale. Bullfrog, as a future reseller of this product, could be a catalyst for more biogas/landfill-gas injection projects emerging across the country, assuming its customers are willing to pay for it. It will also create more awareness of this opportunity, as it did for green electricity.

One barrier in Ontario will be the feed-in-tariff program, which pays a premium to developers who want to turn biogas/landfill gas into electricity. This incentive skews the market in favour of electricity production, which from a greenhouse-gas emissions perspective may not be the best approach. More on that later…

I do want to point out a few upcoming events, however. Read below for details on the Greening Greater Toronto Marketplace on May 12, an alternative energy panel I’m moderating at the Empire Club of Canada on May 21, and the Net-Zero Energy Home Awards on June 8.

First, there’s the Greening Greater Toronto Marketplace happening this Tuesday at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. The marketplace was created by the Greening Greater Toronto Alliance in partnership with the Toronto Region Research Alliance to help local clean-energy and green technology companies get the early orders they need to demonstrate the effectiveness of their products. The idea is that the province’s big corporate and government purchasers become a showcase for made-in-Ontario products that have large domestic and export potential. More than 100 large corporate and government purchasers, representing about $50 billion in procurement power, will be brought together with more than 20 local greentech suppliers. Hopefully they’ll do a friendly dance and strikes some great relationships. This is the first of what’s expected to be an annual affair.

Second, for those who are interested in a lunch-and-learn session, I’ll be moderating a panel on May 21 starting at 11:45 a.m. that will explore alternative energy technologies in Canada and the potential they have to change our electricity and transportation systems. Tom Heintzman, president of green electricity retailer Bullfrog Power; Kerry Adler, CEO of wind and solar developer SkyPower Corp.; and John Thomson, CEO of biogas developer Yield Energy, will be my panelists. Much of the talk will be around opportunities presented by Ontario’s new Green Energy Act, which could get Royal Assent as early as this week.

Finally, the Net-Zero Energy Home Coalition will be holding its inaugural NZEH awards event on the evening of June 8 (a Monday) in Montreal. It will take place at the Westin Hotel. It’s a chance to begin recognizing the important work going on in the builder/architectural community as it relates to net-zero homes, and more importantly the development of net-zero energy homes that can be easily replicated and that don’t come with an obscene premium. Disclosure: I am one of the four judges, and I can confidently say there is impressive work going on. Given the proper planning, there’s no reason why every new home can’t be a net-zero home — or close to it!

Solar domestic hot-water systems don’t grab as many headlines, probably because they’re not considered as high-tech as their solar PV cousins, where science is pushing the boundaries of sunlight-to-electricity conversion. I’m always surprised that residential solar thermal systems don’t get much attention in the United States, particularly in the south where many homes have swimming pools (that need heating) and where the sun shines warm all year, making the payback dramatically better than PV. In Canada, where the conditions are less ideal, we seem for some strange reason to have a greater appreciation for rooftop solar thermal systems, and indeed, have many startups, such as EnerWorks, and academics spending considerable time improving on the technology.

Now, it seems, there’s a much bigger push going on to put solar thermal on Canadian rooftops. Just this week, natural gas distribution giant Enbridge announced a partnership with green electricity retailer Bullfrog Power that is targeting the installation of 1,200 residential solar thermal systems in Ontario over the next two years. The pilot program aims to take advantage of several government incentives, as you’ll find in this Toronto Star article I wrote on the program. The announcement is significant because it’s the first time (at least, I believe, in Ontario) a major fossil-fuel utility has put its name behind a residential renewable-energy technology, beyond tiny-scale pilot studies. Potential customers, in turn, can feel more comfortable dealing with a company they know will be around next year and that already takes their money.

This quote from Enbridge Gas VP Arunas Pleckaitis is perhaps most telling: “You’d have to be from another planet to not realize things are changing. We clearly realize the role of the utility is going to change. The question is, how quickly and what technologies, and what direction will we take? It could be geothermal. It could be micro-generators in people’s homes. It could be heat pumps. There are all sorts of different technologies we’re looking at.’”

Encouraging.