Energy Community extends GO registry deadline to end-2023

Date: July 6^th 2023

Topic: Electricity , Renewables , Coal , Energy policy , CO2 emissions , Economy , Ecology , En.vision

The Energy Community said on Wednesday that the deadline for its contracting parties to sign a service agreement on electronic registries for guarantees of origin (GO) has been extended until the end of 2023.

This decision was made after six GO issuing bodies in the Energy Community failed to sign a service agreement with Grexel by the 30 June deadline, it added in its CBAM (the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism) Readiness Tracker. Grexel, a subsidiary of the EEX exchange, is the leading provider of GO registry services.

GO registries were created in 2022 for Albania, the two entities in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia. In the meantime, Georgia signed a contract with Grexel in January and was followed by Albania and BiH’s Republika Srpska entity in June.

The Energy Community said that the remaining six issuing bodies need to sign these agreements and warned that failure to do so would incur significant costs related to establishing and maintaining the registry.

It also pointed out that a legal deadline to transpose and implement the EU’s updated Renewable Energy Directive (REDII), which requires the EU to meet at least 32% of its total energy needs with renewables by 2030 and includes provisions related to GOs, had expired in December 2022.

In that month, the European Commission (EC) was invited to present a proposal on how to address the obstacles caused by the import restriction imposed by REDII on the trading of member state GOs from third countries. In June, the EC urged the Energy Community contracting parties to establish a functional regional system as the basis for mutual recognition and EU system integration.

Next step

The Energy Community’s readiness tracker also states that the next important step for its contracting parties is to calculate their national residual mix and adopt disclosure rules. It explained that the residual mix plays a critical role in preventing the double counting of electricity from specific energy sources and provides insights into the sources of electricity supply that are not accounted for by GOs.

In so doing, the residual mix enables suppliers to disclose information about the origin of the electricity they provide, while consumers are empowered to make better choices about their energy consumption, it concluded.