Renewable Energy Certificate System Puns

We are having solar panels installed and have entered into an agreement to sell the excess back to our energy company. I received an email from them that states they keep the renewable energy certificates in exchange for buying back any excess energy at full rate. If I care to keep the renewable energy certificates, I may purchase them for a one-time fee. They didn't provide an exact number but stated that it was usually around $100 USD.

I'm having a hard time finding much information via Google on the advantages of keeping the certificates.

I have no plans to do anything other than add solar panels to my house. Is there any advantage to me owning the certificates or am I okay to let the energy company own them? I appreciate any advice.

Hello /r/DIY,

I'm dipping my toes into the world of renewable energy and solar charging to try and run a few small electronics with very low / intermittent loads from a 12V battery and 120V AC inverter. The only device so far is a sprinkler timer, but I would like to use the stored power for intermittent LED walkway lights at night, and eventually install a smart weather station and remote wireless security camera. I intend for this solar generation system to be completely modular, with simple construction and commonly available parts that can be maintained or upgraded down the road (e.g. failed panel, larger battery, etc).

The solar system (lol) will be installed at this utilities cabinet, seen here. I've sketched an imaginary solar panel on top, and a battery inside the cabinet.

Pictures: https://imgur.com/a/5yrhB6T/

The cabinet is a simple stucco-on-wood-frame construction. It's south-facing and gets tons of sunlight every day. The solar panel's wiring needs to be routed inside to a controller, battery, and inverter that will be mounted inside.

There are power meters inside this cabinet installed by Edison. One for each of 4 houses, and a fifth for the sprinkler system. The sprinklers were installed as part of this collection of 4 houses in 1985. It waters the front lawns. We bought this house from a family friend whose elderly relative couldn't take care of themselves anymore so they moved her in with them. She was running the "HOA" finances (it's hardly an HOA, just looks that way on paper) but had fallen behind on some basic things due to early dementia. The rest of the neighbors (two of them are still the first owners) were more than happy to have us take over and start finding ways to improve the property and save money. That's when I discovered the standard recurring "delivery charge" of $18/mo on the power bill. The actual meter only used about 5 ¢ for the whole year. No, that's not a typo. Some months had 0 usage because the meter digits hadn't appeared to move. So Edison charges customers a bit over $200/year just to provide power, even if you don't use much. It seemed dumb to pay $200 / year for using 10 ¢ of power so that was my motivation to explore a solar alternative and look ahead to disconnecting the utility altogether.

SO... I'd like to put together a 12V system with inverter that costs about $200 in parts so the break-even time is one year. Since this is a very low voltage system (under 50 volts), neithe

New to solar, and having a system installed on my roof this week. I've been asked to decide if I want to retain the RECs for a one time cost of ~$90 or allow our utility company to claim the RECs. I'm struggling to figure out what the pros and cons of each option is, and am hoping you all could point me in the direction of some resources that might help?

I'm looking at getting some solar panels installed and one of the companies has said they can add in a Rowan Energy Smart Miner which will pay me 10p per kWh produced. Note this is not an export tariff, I could still use the energy myself or exporting to the grid. It does this by creating Renewable Energy Certificates which then get sold via Rowan's platform. To put that price into perspective my energy supplier currently offers me 5.5p per kWh exported. So I would be getting 10p from Rowan just for generating the power and then either using it myself or getting 5.5p for exporting it. There is a £500 upfront cost for the Smart Miner.

A little digging and I've found out that the company is using a blockchain system. When you produce solar power your Smart Miner generates RWN tokens, based on Ethereum technology, which are then traded on their platform providing you with the money for the power generated.

But I don't really understand who buys the tokens. Is it businesses who want to offset emissions and claim to be 100% green? Is there really enough demand for that to pay me almost double what my energy company is offering and not even take the electricity, thus allowing me to double dip?

I'm not very familiar with blockchain technology and it's such a buzzword I'm generally sceptical of businesses/organisations which say "We're going to revolutionize X using the power of the blockchain!"

The solar panel installation company seem like a legitimate company, they have all the correct certifications and have been registered as a Trusted Trader on consumer website Which? for years so I don't think they would intentionally be offering dodgy products.

So what do you all think of it, have you had any experience of something similar?

Rowan website

Rowan press release, another press release/article

They have a subreddit with 3 members

I've posted this on r/solar too but that's an international sub so I wondered if any UK people have experience of this.

Edit: I've found some more information about this from their website

>Renewable Energy Certificates (sometimes called a REC or a ROC) are certificates that prove that the source of your energy are from a renewable source. If you own a lar

Through the use of a battery energy storage system, Madeira Island in Portugal will drastically reduce the consumption of fossil fuels.

The system's installation will be built next to next to an existing thermal power plant and integrated with the micro-insular network of Madeira. In this way, the region will increase to around 50% of renewable energy in relation to the total.

#emp #emptoken #weareemptoken #sustainability #blockchain

#renewableenergy

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