Modern integrated projects are posing a challenge, when it comes to certification. So highlighted accredited certification body Conformity International South Africa director Igor Djurdjevic in a presentation at the Enlit Africa 2026 conference, at the Cape Town International Convention Centre, on Thursday.

"Certification is a conformity assessment process to ensure technical risks are mitigated by verification against standards," he defined. "It is usually the most complete form of conformity assessment. It can be done on systems, products and projects."

Project certification was new. It could be done, and had been done, especially with wind power projects around the world. There was increasing demand for it.

Executing certification involved evaluation, review, testing, and then decision. Certification usually required annual audits, but in some areas, such as medical or nuclear, the frequency was greater. 

(Accreditation was what was awarded, by national accreditation agencies, to certification bodies, allowing them to undertake certification. Both accreditation and certification bodies had their own international associations.)

The modern challenge to certification bodies was the emergence of projects in which certification had to go beyond their various component products and systems. There had to be a focus on the overall project, from an assessment of the project design, then of the products that would be used to create the system, then of the equipment when it was installed, on to the overall performance of the complete system. This process required the use of experts at every stage.

Djurdjevic pointed out that the IECRE (International Electrical Commission Renewable Energy) encouraged such an approach and provided an accreditation system for certification bodies to provide certification to entire projects. Of course, IECRE accreditation was focused on allowing the certification of renewable-energy projects.

As previously mentioned, this approach had been successfully implemented, especially with wind farms in north-west Europe. But, he noted, it was also applicable to many other utility projects, including solar power and water, as well as smaller-scale industrial projects. 

While the wind sector had rapidly taken up this new approach, its adoption by the solar sector had, he reported, been very slow. He theorised that this might be because of the numerous wind projects located in the more strictly regulated European markets.

The systems certification approach had a number of advantages. These included having only one body providing full conformity assessment requirements for the entire project; the provision of a full understanding of conformity assessment and quality assurance by the service provider to the project owner; the ability to understand all the product and system requirements related to the project while assessing its individual components; and, it was legally more robust, with only one responsible quality assurer.

"Of course, there are [also] disadvantages," he observed. For certification bodies, these included the necessity for the assessors to be speciality experts, and not generalists; and the need for broad expertise in multiple engineering and other fields. For the project developers, these included the limited number of certification bodies currently capable of executing project certification, and that the necessity for a broad range of specialised expertise could increase costs.