Launch HN: Jasmine (YC S22) – Automating REC compliance and payouts for solar

I think it's unlikely that much of the total capacity registered by Jasmine will be pre-2025 builds. So I think your last line is the most likely outcome. More access to the program means more efficient use of the incentive, means (hopefully) more aggressive RPS timelines.

Why do I think that we're unlikely to see a lot of pre-2025 builds?

1) Solar is on an exponential deployment curve, so by definition there's much more capacity in front of us than there is behind us.

2) As a practical matter, the go-to-market motion of on-boarding newly built systems is much easier than the go-to-market motion of on-boarding legacy systems. Channel parters (solar installers, solar point-of-sale systems, solar financiers) all deal with new systems, and new systems are top of mind for recent buyers. Getting our product in front of old system owners is just much harder.

Indeed, RECs are known to have very little additionality and there is a ton of research questioning their role in decarbonization.

"A number of studies have zeroed in on the influence of voluntary RECs—those purchased by private customers—on renewable energy production and have gathered significant evidence to suggest that these certificates have had little to no impact. One of these studies, led by researchers at Princeton, Harvard, and UCLA, for example, found that if the power market for voluntary RECs did not exist, “the amount of electricity generated by wind power in the United States would be little different than what we actually see today.”

A paper published in 2022 in Nature which received significant attention from the media argued that due to the drop in the prices of RECs in recent years, the revenue associated with these certificates is insufficient to promote an increase in green energy production. The paper concludes that while the group of companies being analyzed reported a combined 30.7% reduction in emissions resulting from their REC purchases, the actual reduction was closer to 9.9%."

https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/commentary/blog/renewable-e...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01379-5

Existing small rooftops have always been eligible for RECs, we didn’t create this incentive - it has always been available to this segment. But, the administrative burden put on resi solar installers and developers to manually register thousands of rooftop systems have made it impossible for these small distributed energy systems to claim them, until Jasmine. REC revenue has been knowingly or unknowingly money left on the table that could help lower system cost upfront or generate monthly passive income.

Non utility has been eligible for RECs since the market was created in the early 2000s and with rooftop solar installation sky rocketing in recent years hitting 5 million solar installs, where more than 90% of those installs are on rooftops - this creates an urgency around solving this problem.

We’re automating REC admin so that residential and commercial, the small scale solar segment including third party owned systems (leases and PPA) have easier access to the market by automating registration and simplifying selling.

I only see rooftop solar segment expanding - there’s a huge push on the state level and at the utilities to support distributed generation because of the additional advantage it has on the environment, we want to incentivize more rooftop solar because rooftops already exist rather than taking up land to build solar farms, here’s a good article on this

https://publicinterestnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07...

Yep! If you upload the documents requested by the app, we are able to determine that one way or the other.

Sometimes that's explicitly in the documents and other times it's based on the jurisdiction of the solar installation.

This is my roman empire, and I go back and forth on my conclusions at least once a day.

On one hand, clarity and structure make a platform that's easy to build and collaborate on. If the system enforces the rules, and the rules are a good model of reality, everyone knows what to expect. Pushing the world forward one ISO standard at a time.

On the other hand, greatness can't be planned. By the time we know enough to make a plan, the really important stuff has already happened. "Everyone" expected solar to always be a somewhat marginal energy source, so why spend a lot of time standardizing formats?

And it's not like this is a just a thing in tech. Buildings used to be fine tolerance artifacts built by craftsman. Now we slap them together prefab parts and just add more caulk until it works.

I'm genuinely shocked that the electrical grid works. And the more I learn about how it works, the more shocked I become.

Are we losing our attention spans as a rational response to a world that changing faster and faster; or is our lack of attention creating a less stable world?

Ultimately, we make progress not when the code runs fast, but when the humans run fast; but sometimes that means the code needs to run fast too.

And thank you for the well wishes!

Thank you! We'll check them out.

Thank you!

Thank you!