Many students vie for internships at high-tech companies. But Evan Macmillan ‘09, Chris Olivares ‘10 and Blair Silverberg ‘10 started their own.

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Kayvon Beykpour

Members of Enpalo: Femi Olutade ‘10, William Vijverberg ‘10, Tamara Alexander ‘10, Evan Macmillan ‘09, Eugene Nho ‘10, Otis Chodosh ‘10, Christopher Olivares ‘10, Blair Silverberg ‘10

Last year, the three students founded Enpalo, a company that helps organizations reduce their emission of carbon-based fuels.

“We were interested in expanding the market for renewable energy and eventually settled on the concept of Enpalo,” Macmillan said. “We met last August in Austin after working apart all summer to get the initial groundwork laid for the company.”

Carbon-based fuels are scarce and expensive. Businesses that rely on fossil fuels face reputational, legislative and environmental risks, so the incentive to transition to clean technologies is high. That’s where Enpalo comes in.

One focus is to provide organizations with carbon credits and renewable energy certificates (RECs) to help them reduce emissions. Credits essentially put a price on pollution, providing an economic incentive for companies to lower emissions. An REC, meanwhile, represents a megawatt-hour of electricity produced from a renewable energy source, signifying that a company is utilizing renewable energy.

“We provide organizations with information about renewable energy projects and access to those projects’ credits streams,” Silverberg wrote in an email to The Daily. “The hope is that when organizations have great information and access, more quality projects will get capitalized and implemented.”

To do this, Enpalo partnered with Green-e, a certifier of RECs. Last October in Geneva, the students also signed an agreement with Gold Standard, a certifier of carbon credits, to offer American companies access to high-quality carbon products.

The company itself has already developed its own technology. Recently, it debuted Enpalo Hybrid(tm), the first calculator of its kind to estimate carbon emissions associated with air travel.

“The calculator takes specific data to come up with a more accurate emissions number associated with a flight,” Olivares said. “It’ll take into account specific data — plane type, how much fuel that plane burns, class, airline, destination, etc. — to get a carbon footprint of the flight.”

Research is ongoing. According to its Web site, enpalo.com, the company is “designing systems to empower energy accountability.” The students are also working on improving the information provided to companies concerning carbon credits and RECs.

“We believe that organizations looking to invest in renewable energy projects want more information than is currently available,” Silverberg said. “Our objective is to bring that information to organizations.”

Right now, the Enpalo team consists of a group of engineers and mathematicians — also Stanford students — and an advisory board, chaired by Palo Alto-based Pacific Edge president Karen Payne, whose members have business backgrounds in finance, energy and the environment.

And what’s more, the company is still recruiting. Students who are good with numbers, interested in the environment or excited about startups are encouraged to lend their talents. And who wouldn’t be excited about startups? Think about all those Harvard undergraduates who turned their heads away from Bill Gates.

But for the founders, it’s all about discovery and the possibility of environmental change.

“We want to do something with our time that’s not only interesting but also impactful,” Olivares said. “We’re in an area that can really change the world, so we’re just working very hard to see what this company can do.”