West Cape News

Bianca Silva

The City of Cape Town last week sold its first Green Energy Certificate for wind-generated electricity from the Darling Wind Farm, but energy experts have raised the red flag, saying the city’s certificates are not aligned to national standards.

While the city has developed its own standards for their Green Energy Certificates (GECs), selling wind-generated energy to private buyers, the Department of Energy has tasked the South African National Tradeable Renewable Energy Certificates Team (SANTRECT) to establish the independent issuing body zaRECS as a for-profit organisation to issue Tradeable Renewable Energy Certificates (TRECs).

According to renewable energy trading company GreenX Energy marketing manager Marisa Naude, the cost of finalising domain protocols and a business plan for the issuing body, zaREC, cost around R2 million.

“I remain baffled as to how the city is legally permitted to trade RECs (renewable energy certificates) without going through the independent issuing body,” said Naude

GreenX Energy director Glynn Morris likened the problem with differing renewable energy certificate protocols to organic food labelling.

“The point is to differentiate where the electricity comes from…it’s like the example of organic tomatoes, until someone distinguished where they came from they were just tomatoes,” said Morris, while Naude said the City of Cape Town was like a farmer “who is sticking his own certificates on his tomatoes, they may well be organic, but they shouldn’t be doing it themselves”.

Morris said while the city’s trading of certificates for green electricity was laudable and something she encouraged, it should be in line with national processes.

“It’s important to get it right early on,” said Morris.

The City’s failure to align itself to national policy may be a misunderstanding, said Naude, “they’re not trying to be naughty about it, they just don’t seem to understand the system”.

City head of green energy, Brian Jones, said a national system was not yet finalised and thus the city had developed its own in-house set of rules, which were regularly audited to maintain credibility and increase buyer confidence, but had not ruled out the possibility of working with the national system it if it proved beneficial.

“In terms of the national protocol, we’ve been waiting for a long time, and some say it’s imminent.”

In the meantime there appeared to be “a lack of collaboration and no national strategy to unify the process,” said Jones.

Deputy Mayor Ian Nielson said while the city was issuing its own certificates, the process was audited by the Auditor-General.

“We’re still waiting for the national government to put legislations in place, until then we’re not fully part of the international network,” said Nielson

Jason Schaffler Managing director of zaRECs, said the business plan had been finalised but the sign off of “version 1.0 of the domain protocol” was expected “this month”.

He said certificates acted as records to ensure the same benefit, or “green-ness” was not claimed more than once by a purchaser and zaRECS modelled their protocol on the European Electricity Certification System (EECS), but beneath the EECS’s overarching rules, there was a country specific protocol.

He said adhering to national protocols was voluntary, so the City was not in violation of any code, but “at the end of the day it’s about the credibility of the market – how certain you can be that it’s renewable?”

Schaffler said he “really hopes” the City of Cape Town would register with zaRECS so that zaRECS could “live up to its name of being the single central registry, and then you can be sure everything is running properly”.

He said if the city were to go at it alone, external auditing would be crucial to maintain credibility and ensure there were no financial interests held by the issuing body or that there was no double counting of certificates.

Department of Energy Deputy Director Silas Mulaudzi said the department was not in a position to respond to detailed questions on the establishment of zaRECs at this stage. – West Cape News