This is the first of what we hope will be many posts focused on the solar credit market.  SRECTrade has now been operating our online exchange in New Jersey for nine months.  Since then, we’ve seen the actual value received by solar owners for their credits rise considerably.  More importantly, the rest of the market seems to be catching up as the quotes our clients are hearing from brokers and aggregators are on the rise.  To the extent to which our public auctions have influenced this, we have succeeded in what we originally set out to accomplish.

Our approach has been met with a considerable amount of enthusiasm from solar owners in search of ways to get the best value for their SRECs. We’ve captured some of this feedback on our Testimonials page.  Small business owners and individual home owners who have made the choice to go solar have had little guidance about the SREC market.  Questions loomed about how it worked, where to sell these SRECs and how to value them.  With our SREC Program Information page, we set out to describe the SREC program in layman’s terms and give our clients a clear understanding of what influenced SREC pricing.  In addition to that, our auction clearing prices, as determined by supply and demand, have brought a visibility to the market that had not existed before.  The benefits to our clients are clear, but we are also finding that our public pricing model is generating much interest from other traders, investors, universities and even neighboring state governments.

We launched this venture because we believed there was a missing link in the SREC model and our goal remains the same: bring efficiency to an inefficient market, creating and delivering value to the solar generators.  Recently, we came across a blog post by Dave Conifer who was installing a solar system for the first time and writing about it at http://solarpowr.blogspot.com/.  His story really narrowed in on the exact issue that we are trying to address.  While we were encouraged to know that we turned out to be exactly what Dave was looking for, it was a telling reminder that we still have a long way to go in getting the attention of installation companies as an alternative to the brokers they have been recommending.