Have you ever heard of RECs? RECs (Renewable Energy Certificates) are an important component in the renewable energy sector. What does it mean? A REC is a tradable energy commodity which serves as a proof for the 1 MWh (Megawatt-hour) of electricity that is generated from any kind of renewable energy resources like sunlight, wind, geothermal heat etc. RECs are also known as Green Tags or Tradable Renewable Certificates (TRCs). The entity which is responsible for providing these certificates varies depending on the country. For example, in EU (European Union) this task is handled by the Transmission System Operators (TSOs).
How does RECs work? Let’s assume that an energy company is generating electricity from a renewable energy source which will be transmitted to the main grid system. To distinguish the renewable energy from traditional energy, the electricity generation is divided into two parts as given below:
- Actual energy produced by the generator
- Attributes of the generation which are renewable
The attributes of the energy are called as RECs that can be sold in the energy market. As the generated electricity is transmitted to the main grid, it is no longer called renewable energy because it got mixed with the traditional energy. Generally, 1 REC is equivalent to environment attributes of 1,000 kilowatt-hours or 1 MWh (Megawatt-hour) of renewable energy. If someone is buying RECs, they are making a contribution towards the green environment and improve the market for renewable energy. RECs are also called Green Certificates.
In the US, two types of markets are available for the RECs: Compliance markets and Voluntary markets.
In compliance markets, the potential buyers will be usually the various state governments as they need to use a certain percentage of electricity generated from renewable energy every year to comply with the energy law of US. In voluntary markets, any business or individual who is willing to contribute towards the green environment will be buying the RECs.
The main drawback of the existing system of RECs is that if the total energy generated by a producer is less than 1 MWh, then they will not be eligible to get RECs. This limitation affects many small-scale energy producers as the average energy consumption of a household is less than 1 MWh. How to find a solution for the small energy producers? WePower energy trading platform takes care of all kind of documentation that is required for an energy producer to get the RECs. In case if the total energy generated by an individual producer is less than 1 MWh, it allows the pooling of multiple producers so that their total production is equal to 1 MWh. In this way, the small energy producers will get the benefits of RECs easily. To learn more information about this WePower platform, please visit their whitepaper https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_OW_EddXO5RWWFVQjJGZXpQT3c/view.
As WePower is based on the Ethereum blockchain technology, all the transactions are trusted and transparent. Also, the platform helps the energy producers to raise capital for their business by issuing their own energy based tokens. For that, they need to hold WPR tokens that will be sold by the company during its token sale event. Please visit https://wepower.network/ to find out the latest information about the token sale.