Scottish and Southern Energy has signed four agreements with GD Power Development, a subsidiary of China Guodian Corporation, to support the development of four new wind farms in northeast China.

SSE Energy Supply Ltd will purchase around two million carbon emissions reduction certificates over a period of five years from the start of 2008.

Under the Clean Development Mechanism established under Article 12 of the Kyoto Protocol, countries and companies can meet their carbon emission reduction targets by purchasing CERS from CDM-approved carbon reduction projects in the developing world. This is the first time that SSE has directly acquired primary CERs from a project.

Each of the four wind farms is expected to have an installed capacity of around 50MW and will displace carbon emissions from coal-fired power stations in the region, leading to around two million tonnes of carbon dioxide being avoided. The construction of the first of the wind farms, GD Xingcheng Haibin is already under way and the last of them is expected to be commissioned during 2008.

In May 2007, SSE announced that it has set itself a target to reduce by 20% over 10 years to 2016 the amount of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour of electricity produced at power stations in which it has an ownership or contractual interest. It said its target would include CERs from specific generation projects under the CDM, but would exclude those which are not related to a specific generation project.