We are excited to announce updates to the VCS and CCB Program Fee Schedules that will lower costs for large issuers of VCUs and CCB labels, provide more flexible timing of fee payments in certain circumstances, and ensure consistent application of certain fees across different project types.

  1. Specifically, we are updating the fee schedules to broaden the range of scenarios to which the VCU issuance levy and CCB label fee sliding scale discounts will apply. Projects can now receive these discounts based on the cumulative issuance volume from all verification periods of a single project over a calendar year, rather than being limited to issuances from a single verification period. This change is intended to allow more projects to utilize the sliding scale discounts, as projects no longer need to achieve >1 million emission reductions during a single verification period in order to take advantage of them. The structure for compensation of methodology developers has also been updated to follow the updated VCU issuance levy structure.
    This change is effective starting 1 December 2018, and all VCU issuance levies and CCB label fees issued in December 2018 will be based off of the cumulative issuance volume from each project since 1 January 2018. Starting in January 2019, projects will be required to finish out any existing “12-month issuance periods” that were started before December 2018, per the previous version of the fee schedules. This will give projects who would have had lower issuance fees under the previous version of the fee schedules a grace period to transition to the new structure. After the end of any such “12-month issuance periods”, the new sliding scale structure will apply based on cumulative issuances from 1 January 2019. Example calculations are provided within the updated fee schedules.
  2. We are also introducing an option for project proponents to delay the payment of VCU issuance levies and CCB label fees for individual issuances of more than 500,000 VCUs and/or CCB labels. This change would allow the project proponent to pay the VCU issuance levy and CCB label fee from the proceeds of the sale of credits, for example. If you are interested in using this option, please contact us for more details.
  3. Finally, we are clarifying how the VCS project registration fee is calculated to indicate that this fee must be based on the estimated annual emission reductions from the first ten years of the project crediting period for projects with crediting periods of more than ten years. This update will help ensure that this fee is consistently applied to projects with crediting periods of various lengths.

The full details of these updates are available in the VCS Program Fee Schedule  (which can be found here) and CCB Program Fee Schedule (which can be found here).

As always, any questions, comments, or feedback may be sent to secretariat@verra.org.