Source: Climate Corporation - Tue, 02 Dec 2008
Category: emissiontrading

Poznan Gets Underway with Calls for Urgent Need for Designing Copenhagen Deal

The United Nations Climate Change Conference - Poznań, Poland kicked off Monday, 1 December. The two-week meeting, the fourteenth Conference of the 192 Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the ... read more

The United Nations Climate Change Conference - Poznań, Poland kicked off Monday, 1 December. The two-week meeting, the fourteenth Conference of the 192 Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the fourth meeting of the 183 Parties to the Kyoto Protocol, is the half-way mark in the negotiations on an ambitious and effective international response to climate change. The deal is to be clinched in Copenhagen at the end of 2009 and will take effect in 2013, the year after the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol expires.

Close to eleven thousand participants, including government delegates from 186 Parties to the UNFCCC and representatives from business and industry, environmental organizations and research institutions, are attending the two-week gathering.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, opening the meeting, pointed to the urgent need for progress at Poznań. “Scientists share the view that warming in excess of two degrees Celsius will result in irreversible changes to nearly all ecosystems and the human communities. We shoulder the responsibility to prevent changes that could lastingly disturb the symbiosis between humankind and nature,” he said.

Professor Maciej Nowicki, Polish Minister of the Environment and President of the Conference, warned that the planet had the reached the limits of its confined system and that a business as usual scenario was not an option. “Huge droughts and floods, cyclones with increasingly more destructive power, tropical disease pandemics, a dramatic decline of biodiversity — all these can cause social or even armed conflicts and migration of populations at an unprecedented scale,” he warned.

In Poland, delegates — including Ministers — will discuss their vision for long-term cooperative action on climate change. Poznań is the first time that Ministers will discuss a “shared vision for long-term cooperative action”. One of the key questions will be what kind of mechanisms need to be put in place to deliver on finance, technology and capacity building to help developing countries curb emissions, spur green growth and to cope with the inevitable impacts of climate change. During 2008, Parties submitted proposals and ideas for stronger climate change action.

The more than 700 pages of proposals have been distilled into a single document of 82 pages, which governments can now refine further in light of what they want to negotiate in 2009.
“The fact that there is a text on the table offers governments the first real opportunity of moving beyond the phase of exchanging ideas into one where they will be expressing their position on specific proposals,” said Luiz Figueiredo Machado, Chair of the Ad hoc Working Group on Long-Term Cooperative Action under the Convention. “I am looking forward to see how this text will be fine-tuned in the course of the meeting,” he added.

Parties under the Kyoto Protocol have this year advanced their work on the tools and rules available to developed countries to set ambitious reduction targets beyond 2012. According to Harald Dovland, the Chair of Ad hoc working group on further Commitments for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol, the focus at Poznań needs to turn to the ranges of greenhouse gas emission reductions for industrialized countries.

"Science has told us what is necessary and industrialized countries have committed to take the lead,” said Harald Dovland. "My hope is that the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol can agree in Poznań on an ambitious emission reduction range that can form the basis for intensive negotiations next year.”

In 2007, Parties agreed to consider a greenhouse gas emission reduction range of minus 25 to minus 40 per cent over 1990 levels, a range which could be confirmed at Poznan.

Addressing the delegates in Poznań, Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, pointed towards the need to achieve progress on issues which are important in the short run - up to the end of 2012 - including adaptation, finance, technology and reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.

“The conference needs to deliver on on-going issues, especially issues that are important to developing countries,” he said. “And there is huge pressure on available time up to Copenhagen in 2009,” he added. “So next to on-going work, the conference also needs to lay a solid foundation for an ambitious climate change deal at Copenhagen.”

Alluding to the financial and economic crisis and the opportunities of green and sustainable economic growth, the UN’s top climate change official called on delegates to “increasingly focus on how the climate change regime could become self-financing and to link climate change policies to economic recovery.”

The issue of technology will be high on the agenda and the conference will deal in depth with the issue of risk management and risk reduction strategies, including insurance. In the context of adapting to the inevitable effects of climate change, Parties are expected to put the finishing touches to the Kyoto Protocol’s Adaptation Fund so that is it ready to receive concrete projects as of 2009. The UN Climate Change Conference in Poznań will conduct a review of the Kyoto Protocol and assess to what extent the Protocol’s clean development mechanism can be improved and its geographical reach extended.

The conference will take stock of progress achieved in 2008 and will set out the work programme for the final year of negotiations on the Copenhagen agreement in 2009. At least four major UNFCCC gatherings will take place next year, including the UN Climate Change Conference in Denmark at the end of the year.

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Source: UNFCCC - Tue, 02 Dec 2008
Category: climatepolicy

Malaysia's biggest CDM project to be operational in August 2009

The RM365 million combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT) project in Bintulu, a joint venture between Sarawak Power Generator Sdn Bhd (SPG) and Mitsubishi Corp, is expected to be operational by August next year. Sarawak Energy Bhd (SEB) group managing ... read more

The RM365 million combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT) project in Bintulu, a joint venture between Sarawak Power Generator Sdn Bhd (SPG) and Mitsubishi Corp, is expected to be operational by August next year. Sarawak Energy Bhd (SEB) group managing director, Tan Sri Abdul Aziz Husain, said the project was the country's biggest in terms of carbon credits.

He said Mitsubishi would buy the expected 595,000 carbon credits per year at RM20 million annually over a seven-year period. SPG, a wholly-owned subsidiary of SEB, entered into an ERPA with Mistsubishi. The project has received LOAs from the governments of Japan and Malaysia on June 20 and Nov 13 respectively this year and is expected to be registered as a CDM project in June 2009.

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Source: Carbonyatra - Tue, 02 Dec 2008
Category: business

Suspension is a strong reaction by the CDM Executive Board: DNV

The suspension of DNV from CDM validationa and verification activities by the CDM EB has come as suprise to the DOE. “Based on our extensive experience with more than 40 accreditation bodies worldwide for more than 20 years, we are surprised ... read more

The suspension of DNV from CDM validationa and verification activities by the CDM EB has come as suprise to the DOE.

“Based on our extensive experience with more than 40 accreditation bodies worldwide for more than 20 years, we are surprised that the CDM Executive Board decided to temporarily suspend our accreditation for validation and verification of CDM projects based on the findings in a spot check audit made early November,” says DNV’s CEO Henrik O. Madsen.

“We acknowledge and accept that we have to improve in some areas, but in our opinion a temporary suspension is a strong reaction by the CDM Executive Board.”

The non-conformities mainly relate to DNV’s practices for internal audits, and how DNV documents the allocation of specific competencies to the projects and refer to emerging requirements for allocating competencies. DNV has already been adapting to the new requirements and will now accelerate this process.

“We will do our utmost to regain our accreditation as quickly as possible. This will presumably take 1 to 2 months, depending on the schedule of the CDM Executive Board, and the formal procedures,” says Henrik O.Madsen.

In the meantime, the validation and verification project work for ongoing projects will continue as usual, except for the fact that no projects can be filed for registration by the CDM Executive Board and DNV cannot request issuance of certified emission reductions. This means that some of DNV’s customers may have to wait some weeks longer than expected for their projects’ formal validation and verification procedures. DNV is not in a position to take on new projects as long as the suspension is valid.

“We are contacting our customers and explaining the situation to them. We strongly regret the situation that has occurred. We are doing our utmost to rectify matters as soon as possible,” says CEO Henrik O. Madsen.

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Source: Carbonyatra - Tue, 02 Dec 2008
Category: business

VER market could be a source of inspiration to CER verification: Report

Presenting his analysis in a new UNEP report -"A Reformed CDM", Beno�t Leguet, a Project Manager for Mission Climat, has made three main recommendations emerge from his observation of the bottlenecks, risks and delays observed during the ... read more

Presenting his analysis in a new UNEP report -"A Reformed CDM", Beno�t Leguet, a Project Manager for Mission Climat, has made three main recommendations emerge from his observation of the bottlenecks, risks and delays observed during the CDM project approval and verification process that may be used to strengthen and enlarge the mechanism: (1) use simplified and objective additionality tests; (2) develop methodologies in a top-down process; and (3) improve the validation and verification process.

The verification process could be improved. The CDM EB may focus on checking that an adequate verification protocol has been followed. The goal of verification should not be to check the occurrence of every emission reduction claimed but rather to make sure that the risk of overestimating emission reductions is properly managed.

Two initiatives of the CDM EB are promising in this respect and should be pursued: the previously mentioned Validation and Verification Manual and programmatic CDM, for which random sampling of the individual CDM Programme Activities is allowed for verification. The voluntary market could also be a source of inspiration: the Voluntary Gold Standard has set up a system whereby a share of proceeds from every project goes to a fund managed by the Standard. The purpose of the fund is to pay the verifiers to randomly verify projects.

Setting up a similar system for the CDM would, apart from reducing overall verification costs, address the concerns of some stakeholders that DOEs have a strong incentive to validate any project because they are paid by the project developer and not by an independent body managed by the UN. It would also help address the looming bottleneck at the verification stage due to the lack of trained auditors.

Doubts have been raised by some observers as to the questionable additionality of some projects and the need to tighten criteria for proving additionality. These studies have focused on possible 'false positive' projects i.e. possibly non-additional projects that do get registered. Surprisingly little material can be found on 'false negative' projects i.e. possibly additional projects that do not get registered.

This may be because these false negative projects are by definition never developed. There is unfortunately an inherent information asymmetry between the project developer and the DOEs, and efforts to tighten the criteria for proving additionality might actually have adverse effects, as they would increase costs, delays and risks, and possibly increase the number of false negatives.

On the contrary, additionality tests should be simplified and based on objective criteria, such as a positive list of technologies or technology standards, technology penetration rate and sectoral benchmarks, rather than on the existing tools. This would make it easier for the DOEs to validate projects, and easier for the CDM EB to assess the work of the DOEs. On the negative side, such lists, rates and benchmarks would require a significant amount of time to agree upon and could turn out to be very data-intensive. But in the longer term, the costs of the system would certainly decrease.

At the same time, the number of false positives would, also, most likely increase. It should be borne in mind that two similar approaches can be used to decrease the amount of potentially non-additional CERs that enter the market. First, some approaches for discounting CERs generated by projects whose additionality is not certain have been proposed.

Second, potential windfall profits can be taxed away, and the proceeds used to fund climate-friendly projects such as projects that reduce emissions or climate change-related research. This is what the Chinese government appears to be doing with the sustainability tax it set up, whose proceeds feed the Chinese CDM Fund.

Simplified and objective additionality tests would gradually shift the debate from a project- by-project assessment to the assessment of programs or even policies. The real long-term benefit of a reformed CDM should in essence be to provide incentives for low-carbon investment by favouring the development of national policies and regulations.

The success of small-scale projects despite supposedly higher relative transaction costs indicates that political will, associated with a favourable regulatory, technical and economic environment, can lead to the emergence of clusters of emission-reducing projects. This is a good omen for programmatic CDM and could also provide a testing ground for policy-based CDM pilot projects based, for example, on biomass in India or small hydropower in China.

Another reform that might be considered is developing methodologies using a top-down rather than a bottom-up framework. These types of methodologies, developed for a limited number of sectors, should include additionality tests based on objective criteria including, as previously mentioned, technology or technology standard, technology penetration rate and sectoral benchmarks. Top-down methodologies could prove especially efficient for technologies that have a low penetration rate, such as CCS or energy efficiency projects. The challenge would obviously lie in agreeing on thresholds for the technology penetration rates, sectoral benchmarks, etc.

In the current CDM, the CDM EB is second guessing the validation work carried out by the DOEs with the help of the experts of the Registration and Issuance Team. This process takes time and may partially explain the bottleneck observed in the registration process. Furthermore, review requests and rejections of validations based on the assessment of experts could undermine the process in the long run, since DOEs could then become very selective in the projects they choose to validate.

This could in turn deter project developers in some sectors for which the proof of additionality or other elements in the PDD are too subjective, in particular energy efficiency projects. The registration process pursued by the CDM EB should rather focus on ensuring that an adequate validation protocol has been followed. In this respect, the Validation and Verification Manual (VVM) currently being developed by the Board is a good starting point.

Additionally, the experts of the Registration and Issuance team could perform their review before that of the DOEs, since they have the sectoral and technical expertise that DOEs lack in certain cases. Hence, they can provide technical input to the DOEs for use in the validation process, rather than following the work of the DOEs and possibly contradicting their validation work. If this option is pursued, it would be necessary to pay the experts either by the DOEs or by an ad hoc fund.

In a nutshell, the CDM EB should rely more on the DOEs, which are supposed to work for and not against the EB. Governments have long understood that verifying income tax declarations is costly, hence they have taken a risk-based approach to spot tax evasion by using random sampling in the verification process. If CO2 is to become the 21st century’s currency, the same approach could be used to the benefit of the atmosphere.

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Source: Carbonyatra - Fri, 28 Nov 2008
Category: business

Sharp Corp moving quickly to initiate the world’s first “solar business model”

Sharp Corporation and Italy’s largest power company, Enel SpA, will establish a joint venture in the spring of 2009 to operate as an independent power producer and will develop a number of photovoltaic power plants with a total capacity of 189 ... read more

Sharp Corporation and Italy’s largest power company, Enel SpA, will establish a joint venture in the spring of 2009 to operate as an independent power producer and will develop a number of photovoltaic power plants with a total capacity of 189 MW by the end of 2012.

A number of photovoltaic power plants will be set up mainly in southern Italy and will utilize thin-film solar cells, which offer superior power generating efficiency in hot-climate regions. The two companies are looking into expanding their IPP business in the future to cover countries of the Mediterranean region other than Italy with a view toward further strengthening their cooperative relationship.

Regarding cooperation in the production of thin-film solar cells, the plan is for Sharp, Enel, and a third European manufacturing company to construct a thin-film solar cell plant in Italy with the potential to expand annual production capacity to around 1 GW in the future. The initial phase of development will put in place a production system having an annual capacity of 480 MW, with the aim of starting operations around the middle of 2010.

The three companies are working out the details of establishing the joint venture to manufacture thin-film solar cells in Italy, and plan to sign a memorandum of understanding in December.
Sharp is moving quickly to initiate the world’s first “solar business model” by joining with a power company in an integrated business approach-from manufacture of thin-film solar cells to IPP activities-and is actively working toward becoming a company providing total solutions based on solar cells.

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source: Carbonyatra - Fri, 28 Nov 2008
Category: business

More Than 900 Mayors Join Climate Protection Agreement

Washington, D.C. — The United States Conference of Mayors announced today that more than 900 mayors have signed the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, a significant milestone in the national campaign of cities to reduce ... read more

Washington, D.C. — The United States Conference of Mayors announced today that more than
900 mayors have signed the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, a
significant milestone in the national campaign of cities to reduce global warming.

“With a new Administration that has already committed to make climate protection a priority, we
look forward to working with President-elect Barack Obama to help these 900 + cities reach the
goal set forth by the Kyoto Protocol,” said Conference President Miami Mayor Manny Diaz.

“As our nation and metro areas work to reduce carbon emissions, our determination will open
new opportunities for clean energy and green jobs,” said Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, Vice
President of the Conference who launched the effort three years ago. The milestone of 900
mayors signing the agreement comes as President-elect Barack Obama issued a major policy
statement on global warming. “For years, we have been asking for a strong federal partner to
reduce carbon emissions,” added Nickels.

On Feb. 16, 2005, the day the Kyoto Protocol went into effect for 141 nations around the world
but not the United States, Mayor Nickels called on his fellow mayors across the country to meet
Kyoto’s emission reduction goals.

“Many hundreds of cities committed to do their part and are already taking local actions to save
our planet, we’re looking forward to working with the new Administration and leaders in
Washington to work together to curb global warming,” said Tom Cochran, CEO & Executive
Director of the Conference.

The mayors of New Egypt, N.J., Savannah, Ga.; Lake Placid, N.Y., Springfield, Ill., and
Redondo Beach, Calif., are among the latest to sign the agreement, in which cities pledge to
reduce carbon emissions by seven percent below 1990 levels by 2012. The Mayors Climate
Protection Agreement now represents more than 81 million Americans.

In addition to the Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, Seattle Mayor Nickels spearheaded an
effort to create a larger federal climate policy framework in June 2007. This past year, Nickels
championed a resolution establishing city priorities in a federal cap-and-trade system that
embraced 80 percent reductions of global warming pollution from 1990 levels by 2050 as the
appropriate and necessary national goal, and urged the federal government to act quickly to enact cap-and-trade legislation.

The United States Conference of Mayors is the official nonpartisan organization of cities with
populations of 30,000 or more. There are 1,139 such cities in the country today. Each city is
represented in the conference by its mayor. Miami Mayor Manual A. Diaz, serves as president.
Mayor Nickels currently serves as vice president. For more information about the U.S. Mayors
Climate Protection Agreement, go to:
http://www.usmayors.org/climateprotection/agreement.htm

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Source:�usmayors.org - Wed, 26 Nov 2008
Category: climatepolicy

AGC to develop JI carbon credits for AEG

Alter Energy Group AG in Ukraine has announced it has engaged Anemone Green Capital (AGC) to manage the JI Kyoto Protocol carbon credits registration process for its renewable energy projects. AGC is working on the Joint Implementation carbon ... read more

Alter Energy Group AG in Ukraine has announced it has engaged Anemone Green Capital (AGC) to manage the JI Kyoto Protocol carbon credits registration process for its renewable energy projects.

AGC is working on the Joint Implementation carbon credits for the Smela co-generation / biomass production facility and the Kachanovka co-generation facility on behalf of AEG and its majority owned subsidiary Jugenergopromtrans (JEP).

AGC is a joint venture partner with one of the largest oil and gas distributors in the world that currently holds more than 130 million of carbon credits in its portfolio. AGC has successfully completed 14 bundled small hydro projects in China and is a market leader for alternative energy project development in Ukraine. AEG is active in acquiring and making investments in Ukraine renewable energy generation companies and facilities and other energy infrastructure initiatives in Ukraine.

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Source: Carbonyatra - Wed, 26 Nov 2008
Category: business