Benefits

The AIB offers a standardised solution – the European Energy Certificate System, or “EECS”. This passes on the years of experience and support of members who have already implemented systems, and identifies and overcomes solutions to many common problems. It guarantees collaborative and effective operation of certificate schemes across Europe; providing a structured environment for the harmonisation of such matters as: registration of production devices; coding schemes; definition of certificates and so on.

Furthermore, the AIB offers an electronic Hub, providing a single point of contact for certificate registries. This enables risk to be reduced by means of simple interfacing with other registries and sharing of common information. The Hub will eventually provide a central repository for information relating to market activity (although note that there are no plans for the prices of trades to be captured).

While the AIB cannot change national legislation, by working closely with the issuing bodies for Guarantees of Origin, it can help them to implement national schemes in a way which will be acceptable across Europe, thus promoting the effective operation of the EU RES Directive (2009/28/EC), CHP Directive (2012/27/EC) and Internal Electricity Markets Directive (2009/72/EC).

Certificates could be non-transferable, but then they would need to be used as evidence for contractual purposes, which suggests contract tracking would be necessary if you wanted to find the consumer to whom energy had been supplied. It is extremely difficult to follow the contractual path from generator to consumer, as this can involve many contracts, some of which will not distinguish between energy sources. If done properly, analysing contracts is expensive and prone to error.

Assuming certificates are transferable, and that there is differing demand for electricity from different sources, then this suggests that they will have a value, as they can be used to differentiate between the various energy sources.

The introduction of a market in certificates bring all of the usual market benefits, including improved customer choice, transparency, efficiency and so on.

Certificates for electricity generated and consumed in different countries must conform to a standard recognised in each country. The AIB has created such a standard, the "European Energy Certification System".

EECS is administered in each country or region by an Issuing Body, which is unique to that regime and commercially independent of certificate holders. The details of EECS are set out in "The EECS Rules" and its supporting documents.