The Massachusetts SREC market is in the process of switching from the existing SREC-I program to a yet to be officially proposed SREC-II program.  At a meeting held on Friday, 12/13/2013, Mark Sylvia, the Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources (DOER),  presented a preview of some items we should expect to find in the DOER’s official SREC-II proposal.

In August 2013, the DOER  presented a draft proposal for the SREC-II program with the intention to incorporate feedback from stakeholder groups before presenting a final proposal sometime by the end of 2013. Now that 2013 is nearly done, it’s likely that the formal proposal will not emerge until early January 2014. Once the SREC-II proposal is issued there are several regulatory hoops that the proposal must go through before the program can be put in place. We blogged about the SREC-II implementation timeline in a previous post here and expect the process to take 100 days or more.

Key items learned from Mark Sylvia’s presentation

Items that have not changed from the draft proposal

1) SREC factors and Market Sectors – Depending on project size and other considerations projects will be able to produce SRECs at different rates. Smaller projects receive more SRECs on a per MW-hr basis than larger projects. For example, a residential project will receive 1 SREC for every MW-hr produced, whereas a landfill sited project might receive 0.8 SRECs per MW-hr. SREC factor will be determined by Market Sectors as described below.

2) Declining Solar Credit Clearinghouse Auction (SCCA) pricing and Alternative Compliance Payment (ACP) rates – The SCCA is the MA market’s price floor mechanism. In SREC-I the SCCA is fixed at a price of $300/SREC, but the SCCA will drop from $300 to $285 starting in 2017 and then drop again on a yearly basis with SREC-II. The SREC-II ACP rate will start at $375 in 2014 and 2015 and decline, beginning in 2016, as shown in the table below.

Items that HAVE changed from the draft proposal