Who is watching your SREC account? We came across the story of a municipality that fell behind on managing its SREC account and had to implore large commercial and municipal solar owners to consider joining the 80+ MW of customers in our aggregation services!

A recent New Jersey article about a township and the SRECs that their Water Utility Division was selling titled “Water utility expected to rake in close to $100,000 to benefit ratepayers.” The utility expects to sell 1,500 SRECs that it has accrued since June of 2011. The market price today for those SRECs is roughly $80. So yes, that does result in over $100,000 in SREC revenue.

That said, the article could also be titled “Water utility loses close to $180,000 in SREC value” because if it had been selling its SRECs at market prices in regular intervals as they were issued since July of 2011, the total value of those SREC sales would have been over $280,000. And that does not even account for the time value of money.

Customers on the SRECTrade platform have their SREC accounts automatically updated and tracked to ensure that the SRECs are sold at regular intervals. We automate payments direct to bank accounts and even offer a service where we’ll actively manage the customers account. For a 500kW to 1MW facility, the customer would have paid a 1.0% in additional service fees on $280,000 in SREC transactions. In addition, if they had sold in our auction, the total fees, including the service fee, of 1.5%. That said, the fees don’t matter at all when a passive SREC management approach results in $180,000 in lost revenue!

If you have a commercial solar facility, you may feel like you can stay on top of the SREC market when you first get started, but it is not uncommon for other priorities to overshadow the management of your SRECs, two, five or ten years down the line. Especially in the case of municipalities, where approval processes can take forever. SRECTrade works with dozens of municipalities in a way that allows them to reduce the need for onerous approval processes, allowing them to stay on top of a rapidly changing SREC market. The fees are minimal and it is a no-brainer to make sure that you have someone ensuring that you are maximizing your returns!