Recently, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Finance, and the National Energy Administration jointly issued the "Notice on Achieving Full Coverage of Renewable Energy Green Power Certificates and Promoting Renewable Energy Power Consumption." This notice expands the issuance scope of renewable energy green power certificates (Green Certificates) from onshore wind power and centralized photovoltaic power projects to all registered renewable energy power generation projects, achieving full coverage of Green Certificate issuance. Specifically, this includes all types of wind power (including distributed wind power and offshore wind power), solar power (including distributed photovoltaic power and solar thermal power), conventional hydropower, biomass power, geothermal power, and ocean power.
Green Certificates serve as the sole proof of the environmental attributes of renewable energy electricity, and they are also the only certification for recognizing the production and consumption of green electricity. The Green Certificate issuance and voluntary subscription system was piloted in China in 2017, initially issuing Green Certificates for on-grid electricity generated by wind power and centralized photovoltaic power projects that enjoyed subsidies. Since the implementation of the Green Certificate system, it has preliminarily promoted a good awareness of green electricity consumption throughout society, but there are still issues such as incomplete coverage of Green Certificate issuance and the need for expanding the application areas of Green Certificates.
In order to further activate the Green Certificate trading market and expand the scale of Green Certificate trading, the notice sets out specific requirements for the Green Certificate trading platform, trading methods, and trading benefits. Among them, the Green Certificate trading platform is expanded from the previous China Green Power Certificate Trading Platform to include the Beijing Power Exchange Center and the Guangzhou Power Exchange Center, and it will be further expanded to other nationally recognized trading platforms in due course. Both buyers and sellers can freely choose any Green Certificate trading platform to conduct transactions. Green Certificate trading can be conducted through bilateral negotiation, listing, and centralized bidding. In terms of trading benefits, the notice proposes that for Green Certificates from projects receiving central government subsidies, bilateral negotiation and listing will be primarily adopted initially, with efforts to create conditions for transitioning to centralized bidding as soon as possible, and the Green Certificate benefits will be executed in accordance with relevant regulations.