The Working Group for Renewable Energy held a successful workshop in Copenhagen in April 2011 with attendees from across Scandinavia and Europe. Throughout the day there were presentations and workshops.

One the many results of the day was that the Working Group for Renewable Energy is continuing its work and will further explore various aspects of the mechanisms under the project “Nordic Coop-Mex Testing Ground”, with the main aim to develop a practical framework to facilitate the test and use of Coop-Mex in the Nordic region.National differences
During the highly informative presentations it was made clear that a number of national differences still exist in the region. In brief, Denmark and Finland are planning to meet their national targets with domestic RES production, whereas Sweden has indicated that it could have surplus RES production that could be sold to other countries. Norway and Iceland do not yet have a decision on the use of Coop-Mex.However, Norway and Sweden are currently negotiating creating a common green certificate market. Mr. Juul-Kristensen, the chairman of the Working Group, highlighted “that from the RES support perspective the Nordic countries provide an interesting ground for analysis, as there is wide variety of support schemes (feed-in tariff, tendering, investment aid, green certificates) used in these countries.”European input to the RES discussions
Italy has decided to use Coop-Mex and there are already some projects identified that could be contracted as Joint Projects with third countries and account RES production against Italian targets. In her presentation Ms Agime Gerbeti from Gestore dei Servizi Energetici covered planned projects, Italian support schemes and the implementation of the Coop-Mex in the Italian legislation. It is interesting to notice that Italy requires that power produced by the projects is injected into the Italian grid, and that it is not willing to pay more for the Joint Projects than similar type project receives support in Italy.

Legal issues
Various legal challenges of the Coop-Mex also exist. The main message from the workshop was that from a legal perspective there is not anything extremely difficult, as long as at policy level, it is clear what the objectives of the transaction are. The workshop also discussed using ST transaction in a way that money from the transaction is earmarked for specific RES projects in a similar way as in the Green Investment Schemes in the carbon markets. The Working Group named this a ST+ mechanism.

As a general conclusion, there is still work to be done in order to reach common understanding on various issues at EU level. The Nordic Testing Ground project will provide one platform for these discussions.