Spurned Chinese developers blast U.N. CO2 rulings

According to Reuters, “Developers behind the 19 Chinese wind and hydropower projects rejected by a U.N.-backed clean energy investment panel have accused the board in charge of making arbitrary and non-transparent rule changes.

Most said they had no choice but to reapply to try to earn internationally tradeable carbon offsets they said were needed to make their projects viable.

At its meeting in Bonn, Germany, at the end of July, the Executive Board running the U.N.’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) examined the documentation of 19 Chinese CDM applicants.

The panel said none of them managed to pass muster, even after revisions.

A manager at one of the rejected projects, the Mudanjiang Xiaoguokui wind power plant in northeast China’s Heilongjiang province, accused the executive board of moving the goalposts.

“The EB has changed the rules and we didn’t know about that when the projects were first proposed,” he said.

The CDM encourages investors from industrialized countries to fund clean-energy projects in the developing world by offering carbon credits known as certified emission reductions (CERs). The CERs can then be traded or used to comply with binding Kyoto Protocol emissions targets in rich nations.

China has generated more than half of the CERs so far in the scheme, but it has been widely criticized for exploiting the mechanism and flooding the market with cheap and dubious credits from projects that do little to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Chinese applicants have also been accused of deliberately under-reporting tariffs paid for renewable power in order to pass the CDM’s tough “additionality” test, designed to ensure that projects would only be viable if they receive CERs.”

Read more: Reuters