METRO RAIL CORP EARNS ₹19.5 CRORE FROM SELLING CARBON CREDITS

NEW DELHI: The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) has earned ₹19.5 crore from the sale of the 3.55 million carbon credits that it collected over a period of six years (2012-18) by investing in clean development mechanism projects.

Delhi Metro has registered four of its projects with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC). The projects are: regenerative braking, Modal Shift, MRTS Program of Activities and solar project.

Anuj Dayal, executive director, corporate communications, DMRC said, “All these projects are the first of their kind in the world. Delhi Metro is the first metro or railway project in the world to be registered by the UN under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) to claim carbon credits for its Regenerative Braking Project in 2007.”

The CDM is a project-based Green House Gas (GHG) offset mechanism under the Kyoto Protocol, allowing the public and private sector in high-income nations the opportunity to purchase carbon credits from greenhouse gas emissions-reducing projects in low or middle-income nations as part of their efforts to meet international emissions targets under the Kyoto protocol.

The DMRC earned ₹9.55 crore from the sale of carbon credits it generated from the regenerative braking project—dmrc’s first CDM project. In the regenerative braking project, whenever trains on the Metro network apply brakes, motors on these trains act as generators to produce electrical energy which goes back into the overhead electricity (OHE) lines. The regenerated electrical energy that is supplied back to the OHE is used by other accelerating trains in the same service line, reducing about 30% of electricity requirement.

The second important CDM project is about modal shift in Delhi since DMRC started operations. Dayal said, “The essence of this project is that the carbon footprint of people travelling by Metro is much lesser than that of the same journeys performed by other modes of transport.”