Renewables credits are not CO2 offsets: U.S. expert
Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) are not carbon offsets and should not be eligible as such under a U.S. climate bill.
Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) are not carbon offsets and should not be eligible as such under a U.S. climate bill, an environmental policy expert told Reuters.
Carbon offsets are generated by greenhouse gas cuts made by clean energy projects like wind farms that are 'additional', meaning they would not have been financially viable without the prospect of offset sale revenues.
They are created when renewable power generators sell electricity and then sell the environmental attributes of that electricity separately through a certificate representing one megawatt hour of low-carbon power.
Although RECs are traded in several U.S. states, experts have called them "a poor man's carbon offsets," arguing they do not fund additional renewable energy and therefore should not be eligible under a U.S. cap-and-trade scheme.
"We don't like the idea of RECs as offsets and don't want to see this in a bill," Tim Juliani, said senior fellow at climate policy thinktank the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.
Climate bills introduced by the U.S. Senate last week and passed by the House of Representatives in June would see U.S. carbon dioxide emissions cut to between 17 and 20 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.
Firms unable to cut emissions cheaply can buy offsets, thus creating a market of up to 2 billion tonnes of carbon annually.
As a result, the battle lines have been drawn, with a coalition of international energy firms that support the use of RECs as offsets on one side, and an array of offset aggregators, project developers and climate policy experts on the other.
Click here to read more