The Ministry of Water & Energy (MoWE) and the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA), have setup a joint steering committee that will develop and implement clean and renewable energy projects which can later be entered into the carbon trading scheme. A dozen people, three from the MoWE, and nine from the EPA were selected as committee members during a meeting between the two parties, on April 10, 2013.
The decision to form the committee was made a week earlier, at another meeting where both Wondimu Tekle, state minister for Water & Energy and Desalegn Mesfin, deputy director of the EPA, were present.
Fortune was able to confirm the meeting but its repeated attempts to contact people for more information did not bear fruit.
Biogas bottling; biodiesel from Jatropha oil; electric and clean energy stoves and electric taxis are the six green economic endeavours being considered by the new committee.
Concept notes for four of the six projects, excluding Jatropha biodiesel and clean energy stoves, have been given to the committee members of MoWE for evaluation. These four endeavours need 137 million dollars of financing, in order to be implemented.
After looking at the documents, the three members of the committee at MoWE will meet with their counterparts at the EPA this week to discuss how to best pursue implementation.
The committee will create detailed ideas, look for financing and also work towards entering the projects into the carbon trading scheme, according to Tesfaye Alemayehu, co-ordinator of the bio-energy sector at MoWE, who is also a member of the committee.
Three of the four projects now handed over to MoWE are expected to reduce just over 65.72 thousand tonnes of Carbon-dioxide and greenhouse gases. The fourth, the electric project, if implemented, could save 460.8Gw/hr.
Since its inception in 2005, carbon trading, whereby the amount of greenhouse gases, reduced through clean energy projects is converted into credit and sold on the international market, has boomed into a market that brings in billions of dollars every year.
