The General Office of the National Energy Administration (NEA) has issued a notice to organize and promote the issuance of Green Electricity Certificates (GECs) for renewable energy power generation projects that are not directly connected to the public grid.
The notice specifies that non-public grid projects include off-grid projects and grid-connected projects connected to the user side (or within projects such as green power direct connection).
For projects where grid enterprises install electricity metering devices and accurately measure the electricity at each stage, the GEC issuance, transfer, and cancellation processes are consistent with those for public grid projects. The Beijing, Guangzhou, and Inner Mongolia power trading centers collect and submit basic data to the national GEC issuance and trading system according to data interface requirements, and GECs are issued after review.
For projects where grid enterprises do not install metering devices, the project owners submit data themselves or entrust non-public grid operators to do so, and GECs are issued after review. Data submitting entities must retain relevant materials for at least five years for future reference.
The regional offices of the NEA and provincial energy authorities, according to their respective responsibilities, ensure the effective connection of project registration, electricity data collection, and GEC issuance, and carry out ongoing and ex-post supervision. Priority is given to GEC issuance for projects related to key energy-using industries and enterprises subject to the assessment of minimum renewable energy consumption proportion targets. The Renewable Energy Information Management Center provides technical support.
The annex to the notice specifies the workflow for projects where owners submit data themselves: projects are registered with a single power generation account number per project, and owners must make a credit commitment and upload it to the system. Electricity data can be submitted via manual entry or interface collection. Manual entry requires data such as metering device codes, electricity production month, grid-connected electricity, and self-consumed electricity. Interface collection requires basic and extended data according to the data collection list, and the information system must meet interface technical specifications and security management requirements. Grid-connected electricity is reported based on settlement documents from public grid enterprises, and self-consumed electricity can be reported as generated electricity minus grid-connected electricity. Verification certificates for metering devices issued by statutory electric energy metering verification institutions must be uploaded. If there is electricity settlement with the public grid, settlement certificates must also be provided.
The national GEC issuance and trading system automatically checks the submitted data for reasonableness and marks unreasonable data. The Renewable Energy Information Management Center conducts formal checks and returns non-compliant data. After passing the checks, the data is reviewed by the Qualification Center of the NEA, and GECs are issued: tradable GECs for grid-connected electricity and non-tradable GECs for the remaining electricity. If non-tradable GECs need to be transferred, electricity user information and electricity settlement certificates must be provided. Disputes over issuance results can be raised, and after verification by NEA regional offices, the Qualification Center handles them. Ex-post, the regional offices supervise data authenticity based on the owners' credit status. In case of data quality problems, corrections are ordered; for refusal to correct, GEC issuance and transfer are suspended. Entities involved in data falsification or other disciplinary or illegal acts are transferred for further processing.