Fujian Pingnan Daixi 50MW Hydropower Project

Audit Analysis

A 50 MW run-of-river hydropower project in Fujian, China, registered under CDM with a jurisdictional baseline and VVB-verified combined additionality test. The project is inherently low-risk in terms of permanence and leakage, but a 27% downward revision in the lifetime ERR between two monitoring reports, ten material findings, and five outstanding corrective actions raise data-reliability and documentation-completeness concerns.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠Lifetime ERR dropped from 144,370 tCO₂ (Oct 2011 monitoring report) to 105,338 tCO₂ (Jun 2012 monitoring report), a 27% reduction that signals either an initial over-estimate or a mid-project recalculation not fully explained in the extracted record.
• ⚠Ten material findings and five corrective actions were flagged during validation/monitoring, including a change in the metering system, a required baseline update with 2006 statistics, and a missing ecological-impact description in the PDD.
• ⚠Leakage treatment is inconsistent across documents: the PDD references a quantified leakage figure while the 2012 monitoring report simply deems leakage negligible with a 0% deduction.
• ⚠Total verified ERR for the monitoring period is not stated in the extracted record, preventing an independent cross-check of the claimed figure.

Credit Vintages