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Concept
Renewable Energy Certificate System
Summary
The Renewable Energy Certificate System (RECS) was a voluntary system for international trade in renewable energy certificates that was created by RECS International to stimulate the international development of renewable energy. It advocated the use of a standard energy certificate to provide evidence of the production of a quantity of renewable energy and provided a methodology that enables renewable energy trade, enabling the creation of a market for renewable energy and so promoting the development of new renewable energy capacity.
A RECS energy certificate was issued for every 1 megawatt-hour (MWh) of renewable energy produced by an electricity generation facility that was registered with the relevant national RECS issuing body. These certificates could be transferred between market parties in different countries and were used to provide evidence of the consumption of renewable energy – at which point they were made non-transferable, in order to ensure that the "renewable benefit" was not double-sold.
While RECS guaranteed the source of the energy and prevented double-counting, it was not a label: these also guarantee other matters relating to the supplied electricity, such as the originating technology, the age of the plant, and the source of the energy. Labels must also ensure that sales of labelled electricity either do not change the blend of sources of electricity that is supplied unlabelled, or that the buyers of such electricity are informed accordingly.
The market for RECS certificates was administered by the Association of Issuing Bodies (AIB) according to its European Energy Certificate System (EECS), in the same way as the obligatory guarantees of origin required by the various European Union Directives that have now replaced voluntary RECS certificates in Europe.
Several non-governmental environmental organizations like Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund for Nature claimed that in practice there was no ecological benefit ensured by this certification method alone.
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