Industry News

• The Carbon Reduction Commitment: Qualification Criteria Amended

  22 Jan 2009

  A further amendment to the forthcoming Carbon Reduction Commitment has been announced by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC). For the purpose of determining scheme qualification, half-hourly metering is no longer defined as ‘voluntary half-hourly metering’, but as ‘all remotely read Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) meters that produce half-hourly data, irrespective of whether the half-hourly metered electricity is settled on the half-hourly or non-half-hourly market’. Whilst the original definition appeared somewhat ambiguous regarding the inclusion of smart meters installed on non half-hourly sites, the new classification clearly incorporates such meters.
  
  

  So what does this alteration to the CRC qualification criteria mean? Certainly more organisations will now be captured by the scheme. Although the change in definition does mean that those organisations which have already invested in smart metering may now be captured by the CRC, their positioning in the annual league tables will be enhanced by early adoption of smart metering. As the primary CRC ‘capture year’ was 2008, pursuing a smart metering strategy now will not affect an organisation’s inclusion in the first phase of the scheme, but will still provide the information essential to cutting energy costs and facilitate more effective energy management.
  
  

  Further information regarding the Carbon Reduction Commitment can be found at www.defra.gov.uk and www.decc.gov.uk. UPL is currently working with several of the UK’s larger corporations which already know they are going to be captured by the CRC.