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| Photo: Stig Nygaard |
MTN to sell carbon credits from its trigeneration plant
Telecommunications group MTN has entered into a commercial agreement to sell carbon credits from its new trigeneration plant to electricity utility company EDF Trading, a wholly owned subsidiary of Electricité de France SA. The R22-million energy efficient, methane-powered plant, which was constructed at the company’s Fairland offices, in Johannesburg, produced 2 MW of the head office’s 4 MW energy consumption. During a media visit to the plant on Wednesday, MTN said that the emissions reduction purchase agreement would allow EDF Trading to purchase all the credits from the plant until 2020. “EDF Trading will use the carbon credits to contribute to compliance of their quantified greenhouse-gas emission reduction targets of the Kyoto Protocol and European Union Emissions Trading Scheme,” said carbon advisory firm Promethium Carbon director
Robbie Louw.
One carbon credit equalled one ton a year of carbon dioxide emission (CO
2e) reduction. The plant was expected to offset 15 000 t/y CO
2e. Africa’s first trigeneration plant aimed to reduce the head office’s reliance on South Africa’s strained electricity grid. MTN noted that reducing the group’s reliance on the increasingly expensive national grid-generated electricity, as well as revenue from the sale of the carbon credits made the project economically viable. It was expected to “pay for itself” within the next five years. The project, which creates electricity, cooling and heating from gas sourced from the Sasol pipeline, in Mozambique, and distributed to the site by Egoli Gas, was said to be the first project of its type in Africa and the first time this technology has been submitted to the United Nations (UN) for approval as a Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) project.
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