On September 5, 2024, the National Energy Administration (NEA) officially issued a notice on the Rules for the Issuance and Trading of Green Electricity Certificates (GECs) for Renewable Energy, emphasising the status of GECs as “the only proof of environmental attributes of renewable energy” and “the only certificate for the production and consumption of renewable electricity”. This marks the official establishment of a comprehensive GEC issuance and trading system.
With the GEC as the sole Renewable Energy Certificate (REC) system for the China market, the I-TRACK Foundation, founder of the I-REC(E), recently officially announced that it will no longer register new power generation assets in China, and the issuance of I-REC(E) certificates will officially stop on 31st March 2025.
The GEC will become a key tool for enterprises to achieve carbon neutrality goals in the future. This means that domestic and foreign companies will use GEC to address Scope 2 emissions within the Chinese market. In particular, energy-intensive enterprises have responded to the government’s compliance requirements for energy consumption and renewable energy consumption, further stimulating demand.
For a long time, due to the coexistence of I-REC(E) and GEC and the fact that they are not interoperable, the risk of duplication of environmental benefits of issuing both I-REC(E) and GEC certificates existed. At the same time, China’s voluntary emission reduction market, the China Certified Emissions Reduction (CCER), was relaunched in January 2024 to cover two renewable energy generation technologies (offshore wind and solar thermal power), which also leads to a potential double-counting of environmental attributes between GEC and CCER.
With the announcement of no new I-REC(E) certificate issuance, and the National Energy Administration’s official announcement on linking the GEC and CCER trading systems to exchange data, the duplication of the GEC environmental attributes for any energy will be avoided. Businesses may procure and retire GECs confident in the integrity of the certificates.
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