Article 18Unreasonable costs
1.Where an operator or aircraft operator claims that applying a specific monitoring methodology would incur unreasonable costs, the competent authority shall assess whether the costs are unreasonable, taking into account the operator's justification.
The competent authority shall consider costs unreasonable where the cost estimate exceeds the benefit. To that end, the benefit shall be calculated by multiplying an improvement factor by a reference price of EUR 20 per allowance and costs shall include an appropriate depreciation period based on the economic lifetime of the equipment.
2.When assessing the unreasonable nature of the costs with regard to the operator's choice of tier levels for activity data, the competent authority shall use as the improvement factor referred to in paragraph 1 the difference between the uncertainty currently achieved and the uncertainty threshold of the tier that would be achieved by the improvement multiplied by the average annual emissions caused by that source stream over the three most recent years.
In the absence of such data on the average annual emissions caused by that source stream over the three most recent years, the operator or aircraft operator shall provide a conservative estimate of the annual average emissions, with the exclusion of CO2 stemming from biomass and before subtraction of transferred CO2. For measuring instruments under national legal metrological control, the uncertainty currently achieved may be substituted by the maximum permissible error in service allowed by the relevant national legislation.
3.When assessing the unreasonable nature of the costs with regard to measures increasing the quality of reported emissions but without direct impact on the accuracy of activity data, the competent authority shall use an improvement factor of 1 % of the average annual emissions of the respective source streams in the three most recent reporting periods. Those measures may include:
(a)switching from default values to analyses to determine calculation factors;
(b)an increase of the number of analyses per source stream;
(c)where the specific measuring task does not fall under national legal metrological control, the substitution of measuring instruments with instruments complying with relevant requirements of legal metrological control of the Member State in similar applications, or to measuring instruments meeting national rules adopted pursuant to Directive 2014/31/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council(1) or Directive 2014/32/EU;
(d)shortening calibration and maintenance intervals of measuring instruments;
(e)improvements to data-flow activities and control activities that significantly reduce the inherent or control risk.
4.Measures relating to the improvement of an installation's monitoring methodology shall not be deemed to incur unreasonable costs up to an accumulated amount of EUR 2 000 per reporting period. For installations with low emissions that threshold shall be EUR 500 per reporting period.
Directive 2014/31/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 26 February 2014 on the harmonisation of the laws of the Member States relating to the making available on the market of non-automatic weighing instruments (OJ L 96, 29.3.2014, p. 107).