The Global Carbon Council (GCC) and The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) have allied to create an online platform for linking small-scale clean energy projects in India to the global carbon market. This platform is expected to help monetize emission reductions from small-scale clean energy projects.

The partnership has been made official by signing a memorandum of understanding between the Global Carbon Council and TERI. This platform is designed to aggregate climate action such as solar lighting systems, clean cooking systems, and other renewable-powered devices for households and small-scale enterprises. By aggregating these small-scale clean energy projects, it is expected to help them attain carbon credits, which can be made available to the global market.

The new project is to be carried out under TERI’s Lighting a Billion Livelihoods (LaBL 2.0) initiative, which helps to support decentralised renewable energy solutions for rural and underserved communities. This includes solar lanterns, solar charging stations, and other small-scale renewable energy solutions for communities in these areas, where access to grid electricity may be low.

Traditionally, carbon markets have been dominated by infrastructure or industrial-scale projects, which offer more easily measurable and verifiable emissions reductions. However, smaller-scale community-based projects may be outside the scope of such systems, particularly if the cost of monitoring and verification is high compared to the project’s scale. The proposed digital marketplace will address the issue of smaller-scale community-based projects, as the thousands of such projects will be aggregated and their cumulative emissions reductions will be traded as carbon credits.

The digital marketplace will utilize digital monitoring, reporting, and verification systems, which will enable the tracking of emissions reductions. These systems will allow the monitoring and reporting of project registration, emissions reductions, and the issuance of credits in a structured and organized way. This will enable the demonstration of measurable and significant climate change mitigation benefits. The verified credits will be traded on the voluntary carbon markets.

The digital marketplace will be created as a separate platform or will be integrated with the Global Carbon Council’s ASCENT Energy Access Portal, which has been developed with the support of the World Bank.

India has made strides in increasing renewable energy deployment in the last few years, but decentralized clean energy systems still have a part to play in addressing rural energy access challenges. Programmes like LaBL are focused on ensuring that there is a reliable supply of electricity to households and small businesses that may not have a consistent grid connection.

The initiative could open up another source of funding for small rural renewable energy projects by allowing them to participate in carbon markets. The carbon credits that are created by these projects could act as a source of funding to expand clean energy systems and improve rural energy access.