Australian utility Hydro Tasmania expects to generate the first guarantees of origin (GOOs) under the newly launched renewable electricity certification "in early 2026", the company has told Argus, after the scheme officially started earlier this week.
The Tasmanian state government-owned utility is making preparations "consistent with the GOO scheme requirements", it said, adding that it aims to provide its customers with the products that they want, including large-scale certificates (LGC), international renewable energy certificates (I-RECs) or GOOs.
Most of Hydro Tasmania's hydropower stations were commissioned before 1997 and, as such, they have largely been excluded from LGC creation under the current Renewable Energy Target (RET) framework. The scheme sets an individual baseline based on average output, with plants able to create LGCs only for generation above that.
Around 80pc of the utility's average annual generation is "below baseline", making up about 8TWh, which is more than half of the total below-baseline generation in Australia.
Generation from these assets has been issued in recent years with I-RECs, a parallel voluntary framework that mostly applies to electricity consumption outside Australia, when businesses have operations overseas.
Under the newly launched GOO scheme, renewable guarantees of origin (Regos) can be issued for below-baseline generators but are subject to restrictions on their validity and use. In particular, they must be retired within 18 months from electricity generation or dispatch, whereas standard certificates can be retired for up to 36 months. They can only be used as input to a product guarantee of origin (PGO) — another type of certificate in the new framework — or be retired for a facility carrying out "emissions-intensive trade-exposed" activities. Alternatively, they can also be retired for the purposes of self-consumption.
"Legacy baselines" for facilities operational before 1997 "will apply until the end of 2030", a spokesperson at Australia's Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) told Argus, adding that once that baseline is met each year, "any Rego certificates created […] in the same year won't be labelled as below-baseline".
With Regos and LGCs now coexisting until 2030, "facilities can participate in both schemes at the same time", Australia's Clean Energy Regulator (CER) said earlier this week, "but cannot claim LGCs and Rego certificates for the same electricity". The same applies to Regos and I-RECs.
Argus understands this leaves pre-1997 stations with the ability to create both LGCs for above-baseline and REGOs or I-RECs for below-baseline in the same year, which was one of points raised by Hydro Tasmania in response to a consultation on draft GOO rules earlier this year.
While agreeing with the 18-month retirement limitation, the utility had also requested that it be applied to all Regos, to have better alignment between consumer claims and actual power consumption.
Some market participants had raised concerns last year about allowing below-baseline generation to issue Regos, as these facilities have already been paid for through taxes and energy charges and because it could create uncertainty for new renewable energy investments.
