Solar Renewable Energy Certificate Auctions
| Program Type | Performance-based Incentive |
|---|---|
| Technologies | Photovoltaics |
| Amount | Varied amount based on open auction process |
| Required Documentation |
You are responsible for ensuring that your facility has been certified by the state, registered with the SREC tracking registry and is transferable to SRECTrade upon close of the auction |
| Official Web Site | http://www.srectrade.com/north_carolina_srec.php |
Solar Renewable Energy Certificates (SRECs) are used in an open auction bid process through SRECTrade where producers of grid-tied renewable solar energy can sell their green-electricity to buyers wherever SRECs are available. SRECTrade's monthly auction is designed and optimized to match buyers and sellers of SRECs in the most fair and efficient manner possible. In addition to the auction, SRECTrade has created EasyREC, a service dedicated to automating the bidding process and eliminating any work on the part of the seller.
With SRECTrade, buyers and sellers can log onto the website at any time and indicate the number and price of SRECs they would like to buy or sell. These indications are called “orders,” and orders are accumulated over the course of a month where at the end of the month as many orders as possible are auctioned off. Auctions close on the first Friday of each month. The best rule of thumb is to expect SRECs sold the first week of each month, and payments received the last week.
To maximize the number of orders executed in each auction, SRECTrade determines a market clearing price at which all eligible SRECs will be traded. To determine this price, SRECTrade ranks the “bids” to buy SRECs from highest price per certificate to the lowest and ranks the “offers” to sell SRECs from lowest price to the highest.
SRECTrade then starts a matching process, pairing the lowest offers with the highest bids. SRECTrade continues down the list of orders, matching higher bids with lower offers, until bid and offer values are equal; this point of equality is the auction's clearing price. It is at this clearing price that all the matched bids and offers are exchanged. Any bids to buy below the clearing price and any offers to sell above the clearing price will not be exchanged. This ensures that sellers never receive less than their offer price and buyers never pay more than their bid price.
