INDEPENDENT NEWS

Celsias appoints Nick Lewis as its CEO

Published: Fri 10 Nov 2006 12:26 AM
CELSIAS
11 November 2006
MEDIA RELEASE
Celsias appoints Nick Lewis as its Chief Executive Officer
Celsias, the world’s first online community that allows regions, businesses or community groups to be paid for reducing the carbon emissions from their everyday energy use, has appointed Nicholas (Nick) R. Lewis, CFA as its first chief executive officer.
Celsias, which is expected to go live in early 2007, is the first system in the world that allows businesses and communities to track, create and trade carbon credits all in one place on the internet.
Lewis says he wanted to join Celsias because it was an exciting project with global potential, and “a very cool thing to do for our warming planet”.
Lewis was formerly chief executive of Wellington metering technology company Energy Intellect, which he joined in 2004 after emigrating from New York.
He was formerly the group head of the Power and Utility Investment Banking Team at CIBC World Markets in New York responsible for the US utility sector. Prior to CIBC, he was a senior banker at JP Morgan & Co., Inc. covering the same sector, and a risk manager responsible for approving the credit and financial structure of transactions with the energy sector. Here he successfully completed the requirements for the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation.
Before joining Wall Street, Lewis was the founder and CEO of NADE Corporation, an outsource provider of drug and alcohol services to the utility, airline, law enforcement and general corporate markets in the US. He was also a Peace Corps Volunteer who served in the Yemen Arab Republic, and a nuclear engineer with Asea Brown Boveri (ABB) and Westinghouse. Lewis also serves on the Board of Directors of St. Mark's Church School in Wellington, New Zealand.
He graduated with a double degree in Mechanical Engineering and Liberal Arts, and qualified for three minors in Spanish, Psychology and Geophysics from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, US.
Lewis was born in Strasbourg, France and lived in Canada before emigrating to the US to attend university. He is a citizen of the UK, Canada, the US, and he and his family have recently obtained permanent resident status in New Zealand.
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BACKGROUND ON CELSIAS
How does Celsias work? Businesses or communities can go online, enter their energy expenses each month, for example electricity, and the company they buy from, and the Celsias system will automatically calculate their total ‘carbon footprint’, or how much carbon dioxide they are releasing into the atmosphere.
They can create a carbon footprint for their home, their business, their community group or any other entity. They can then create carbon credits for themselves by learning how to reduce their energy use and by using the Celsias search service to find more energy-efficient products and services. They can then put their carbon credits on the Celsias trading system and when someone buys them, they get paid.
Carbon credits can be traded internationally among Celsias registered members. Registration is free and traders only pay for success.
Up till now no-one else has provided an end-to-end solution where you can get paid to play your part in solving the climate change crisis.
Currently, only large organisations have been able to enter the carbon emissions management market. Small to medium businesses and communities, which represent up to 40% of the global energy market, are excluded because they lack the tools and support to join in.
Celsias is unique in many ways. It is the only service to plug into a range of existing accounting software packages to automate energy expenditure data collection for carbon footprint collection; it is the only peer-to-peer global carbon credit trading service that does not require intermediaries; it is the only carbon credit trading platform with no minimum trading volume and it has the only search engine to make it easy to trade in the world’s most energy efficient products and services.
So will carbon credits be valuable? This year the carbon credit trading market is forecast to be twice as big as the Google advertising market and grow 10 times as fast. And once the Kyoto Protocol commitment period comes into force from 2008-2012, many governments and businesses worldwide will need to buy surplus carbon credits to meet their agreed emission targets.
The international free market sets the price for emission units or carbon credits. In a recent deal between Meridian Energy and the Netherlands Government, however, the price was set at NZ 10.50 a unit. But the price fluctuates and has been up at NZ 50.00 a unit earlier this year.
Celsias also enables anyone (a business, a community group, a school) to set up their own carbon market to aggregate carbon credits for their members – and derive revenues from this activity - much like eBay’s ‘power sellers’.
Celsias’s core goal is to assist its members to create as many carbon credits as possible. Celsias will, in effect, pay them to save the world.
ENDS

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