Current Affairs Foreign Affairs

Union Minister of Power, Shri Sushilkumar Shinde, and the Minister of State for Energy and Climate Change of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Mr Greg Barker, met today in New Delhi for bilateral discussions.  Among other issues of mutual interest, they discussed the question of industrial energy efficiency, and considered areas where bilateral collaboration could help inform analysis and future work on both sides.  They agreed that officials from their respective ministries should take forward enhanced cooperation in the following areas:

Sharing of Experiences

        Institutional structure and best practices from United Kingdom and European Union schemes relevant to Perform, Achieve and Trade (PAT) mechanism, including on how schemes may be expanded over time;

        Details of related schemes in UK & Europe (thematic areas of study between Climate Change Agreement (CCA) & PAT mechanism);

        Sharing of key success factors for trading schemes by building regular review points to allow for “learning by doing” (refining of targets from time to time) and by having some early restrictions on banking of certificates;

        Methodology for setting targets, penalties, enforcement, etc. and sharing of best industrial and market practices; target setting and benchmarking;

        Financial issues including taxation treatment of certificates and market regulation.

Capacity Building of

        Policy makers on approach for PAT implementation including setting targets; industry dialogue, fiscal incentives to promote markets for energy efficiency trading;

        Industry with information about technology deployment and introduction of best practice techniques through successful examples in UK.

Development of data management and trading tools

        Development of reporting, monitoring and verification formats and protocols; and outreach with industry.

‘Kick starting the market’

        Development of appropriate upfront pricing mechanism to bring out the price of certificates which could  enable industry to take an investment decision;

        Exploration of the potential of a partial risk credit guarantee fund for energy efficiency, to help ‘kick start the market’ for energy efficiency investment;

        Mechanism to enhance liquidity and stability of prices of Energy Savings Certificates (ESCerts);

        Analysis into the potential of using the carbon market (and international public finance) to support the strengthening of PAT.

The two sides also discussed the possibility of working in the area of Smart Grids.