Green power certificates on sale

Cape Town - Sales of Cape Town municipality’s green electricity certificates are proceeding lethargically, Sake24 has confidentially been told.

A week or so ago the municipality began to market the certificates. Anyone with a clean financial record with the municipality can buy these certificates, which are expected to be popular with exporters who are under pressure from overseas trading partners to reduce their carbon footprint.

A certificate costs 25c per kWh (excl VAT), over and above normal electricity prices. It represents 1 kWh of clean electricity generated by the Darling Wind Farm. The buyer is really purchasing the right to say his electricity comes from a clean, renewable source.

Brian Jones, head of Green Energy for the city’s electricity services, says the certificates are handled separately from normal electricity sales because it is not possible to distinguish between "dirty" and "clean" electricity on the network, and because only a limited number of green certificates are for sale.

Jones says in order to keep administrative costs low the city prefers to sell the certificates to large electricity consumers, although households may also apply.

The certificates will be on sale once or twice a year.

From 2008 Cape Town has had a 20-year contract with the Darling Wind Farm to buy all the electricity it generates and sell it on through its municipal power network. The 25c/kWh covers what it costs the municipality to buy the power from the wind farm, as it currently has to pay more for it than it does for Eskom’s electricity.

The initial estimate was that the wind farm would produce 13.2GWh of power a year, but Sake24 has ascertained that this has since been scaled down to between 10GWh and 12GWh. This is about 0.1% of the city’s total electricity consumption.

Brenda Martin, project manager of climate change action group Project 90x2030, says the purchase of green electricity certificates is a good way for an enterprise to compensate for the greenhouse gas emissions it continues to release after having reduced its electricity demand as much as possible.

 - Sake24.com

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