The CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme (CRC) will affect large public and private sector organisations across the UK. Likely participants will include supermarkets, water companies, banks, local authorities (including state-funded schools) and all central Government Departments. Organisations will qualify as a CRC participant based on their half-hourly electricity usage. You can find specific guidance on qualification and registration in the Environment Agency’s guidance document ‘Am I in? A guide to qualification and organisational structure’.
If you are a subsidiary of an organisation, or part of a group, the group must act as one entity. Your highest parent organisation will normally be the ‘primary member’ who must carry out administrative actions on behalf of the group. Other organisations within the group should provide information about their energy use to the primary member. If the highest parent organisation is based outside the UK, your group must nominate a UK subsidiary to represent the whole organisation.
Where an organisation has any subsidiaries that would be eligible to participate in their own right were they not part of a group (known as Significant Group Undertakings – SGUs), it has the choice to disaggregate these large subsidiaries to participate in the CRC separately. As part of the registration process a participant will be able to nominate any SGU that it wishes to disaggregate and participate separately in CRC.
In the scheme, energy use is the responsibility of whichever organisation is responsible for the energy supply.
You can find more about this in the CRC energy efficiency scheme user guide. For more specific guidance you can consult the Environment Agency’s guidance on ‘Supply Rules’.
Qualification
Qualification for the scheme is based on half-hourly metered electricity usage. Your organisation will qualify if during the 2008 calendar year it:
- had at least one half-hourly electricity meter (HHM) settled on the half-hourly market across the whole organisation.
- had a total half-hourly electricity consumption over 6,000 megawatt-hours (MWh) once electricity used for transport and domestic accommodation has been excluded.
A summary of steps to determine whether your organisation qualities for participation in the CRC can be found on the Environment Agency website.
Your electricity supplier will be able to confirm if you have any half-hourly meters settled on the half-hourly market. In the scheme, half-hourly meters include any:
- mandatory half-hourly meters;
- voluntary half-hourly meters;
- half-hourly light meters;
- pseudo half-hourly meters (commonly used to measure electricity consumption of street furniture – e.g. street lights, traffic lights, etc); and
- remotely read Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) meters that produce half-hourly data. These are not necessarily settled on the half-hourly market and therefore do not count towards the first qualification criterion.
You can find further guidance in the Meters and Metering document produced by the Environment Agency which provides information on different meter types and explains how to collect the required data from them.
All organisations that meet the first criterion but consume less than 6,000MWh of half-hourly electricity will not qualify. They will however still need to make an information disclosure to the Environment Agency during the registration period. You can find more about this in the CRC energy efficiency scheme user guide.
Exemptions
To minimise administration, the scheme will include emissions not covered by Climate Change Agreements (CCAs) or the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS). In addition, any part of an organisation with more than 25 percent of their energy use emissions covered by a CCA will be exempt from the scheme. Only the specific subsidiary with the CCA will be exempt, rather than the entire organisational group. Further details about claiming these exemptions can be found in the EA guidance on how CRC treats emissions which are already regulated as part of a Climate Change Agreement (CCA) or the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS).