Making Money with New Jersey SRECs


Think of it this way: your rooftop photovoltaic(PV) system is your own business enterprise.  Inthe world of business, as a company generates revenue, it issues stocksand bonds, which are then sold in a financial market, bringing in evenmore money for the firm.  Your PV system isn’tgenerating financial revenue, however; it’s generating clean energy“revenue.”  And as you generate a predeterminedamount of energy, you are issued a “share” in the form of an SREC,occasionally known as a Green Tag, which you can then sell on the market to the highest bidder.

Why would anybody want to buy an SREC from you?  The answer is that many states have what’s known as a renewable portfolio standard (RPS), in which the state has decided that a certain percentage of its total electricity has to come from solarpower each year.  Power utilities need to meetthat percentage, or pay huge fines.  So they turnto residential and commercial suppliers (i.e. you) to buy green powercredits.

In New Jersey, for example, once your installer has connected your PV system to the grid, you’ll earn one SREC forevery 1000 Kilowatt hours (kWh) of generation, which is thesame as one Megawatt hour (mWh).  Mid-Atlanticstates typically get 10,000-12,000 hours of usable sunlight per year, so for every kilowatt in your PV system, you’ll get 1-1.2 SRECs annually.  So if a typical home requires a 7 kilowatt system,you can expect to earn at least 7 SRECs per year.  Once you install your system, you can earn SRECs for fifteen years, and they last for two years once issued.

Now, onto the fun part—making money. Once you register your system with the SREC tracking system, you’ll create an online account that will log your green power generation.  You’ll be issued energycredits, which you can then post onto a message board on the website and negotiate the terms of your sale directly with utility buyers.  For those who’d prefer to let someone else handle thenegotiations, you can arrange to have an agent or “aggregator” handlethe sales of SRECS.  

So how much can you expect to make? Well, in New Jersey the state has issued what’s known as a Solar Alternative Compliance Payment.  It’s the penalty per mWh that utilities have to pay if they don’t have enough SRECsrelative to their target.  This year it’s around$690, which acts as ceiling price (i.e. they’ll never pay you more, butthey will pay up to it per SREC).  So far thisyear the average price has hovered around $550 per SREC in New Jersey.  So if you’regenerating 7 SRECs per year, that’s $3850 in cash coming in to you every year—not bad!



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