At this week’s Board meeting, members will discuss two projects that are applying for carbon credits for building new coal-fired power stations[1]. One of these is the largest of all coal power plants currently in the CDM pipeline: With its 4000 MW capacity, the Sasan project, located in India, would be the size of about eight average coal plants. It could earn almost 4 million CERs per year while emitting over 20 million tonnes of CO₂. However, the project is non-additionalas there is clear evidence that the project had already been planned as is, even without the CDM incentives. This week, the Board is set to launch a review of the application. The final decision on the project is scheduled for the next CDM EB meeting.

Another supercriticial coal power plant under discussion at this meeting is the Tirora project, also located in India. If the project was accepted it would generate around 12 million CERs over the next 10 years. The project’s application has been reviewed over the past few weeks and a final decision is set to be taken at this week’s meeting. Its developers’ claims as to why it would be a valid CDM project are very dubious: many details in the project documentation are highly questionable: from the way the baseline scenario is defined to how additionality is ‘proven’. Based on a whole slew of details in the project design document and the validation report, CDM Watch believes unequivocally that the Tirora project is not additional. It must therefore be rejected[2].