DMRC becomes 1st r'way to earn carbon credits, to get Rs 1.2 cr yrly

New Delhi, Jan 4 (UNI) Setting another record in its considerable list of accomplishments, the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) has become the first railway or metro network in the world to claim carbon credits, worth Rs 1.2 crore per year for the next 10 years.

''We have become the first railway project in the world to be registered by the United Nations under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), thus enabling us to claim carbon credits...

we can now claim 400,000 Certified Emission Reductions (CERs) over the next 10 years,'' DMRC's CPRO Anuj Dayal said.

The CERs or the carbon credits would be earned by the almost 30 per cent overall saving in electricity used to run its trains by innovative use of regenerative braking systems in them, he said, noting that though these systems were used by almost every railway system in the world, including Indian Railways, it was the DMRC which had become the pioneer in utilising it for this purpose.

Explaining the features of the system, Mr Dayal said in this braking system, every time the brakes are applied, the kinetic energy so released starts up a convertor-inverter, which generates electricity and supplies it back to the overhead lines.

This generated electricity can be utilised by other accelerating trains in the same service line, leading to the saving of energy.

The DMRC had commenced this project in September 2006, with the support of Japan Carbon Finance Ltd, which will buy the credits, and Ernst&Young as the technical consultants. ''It took us a lot of time to validate the results of the scheme...

each train has a operation management system, akin to the black box of a aeroplane, which records all the operating data. All this data -- from 70 pairs of trains -- was downloaded and analysed by the German technical service provider TUV Nord, which was asked by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to validate our system.. it took over an year,'' he said.

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