Available for homes in Maryland, Washington, D.C., Virginia, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
I view panels as a safe, reliable, fixed income investment with less risk than the stock market or real estate.
— Uday Patel
Learn what customers say about the Astrum Solar experience.
Maryland passed a landmark bill that stipulates a Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) for its utilities. An RPS says that the utility needs to produce some proportion of its electricity using renewable sources of energy or pay a fine to the state. This is great news for the Maryland Renewable Energy industry, especially since the law specifies that a certain proportion of the electricity has to come from solar, and the penalties of not complying are steep. However, the law doesn’t mean that the utility has to actually install solar panels. Instead, it can buy Solar Renewable Energy Credits (SRECs) from homeowners as if it had installed the solar panels itself. It’s a win-win-win situation! The homeowner gets money from the utility for putting up solar panels, the utilities don’t need to become experts in building solar roofs, and the state gets more solar installations.
An SREC is equivalent to 1,000 kilowatt-hours produced in a year, or a little less than what a 1 kW system will produce. Therefore, a homeowner who has a 3 kW system installed on their home generates approximately 3 SRECs per year. That homeowner can then sell the SRECs to the power company so the power company doesn’t have to pay the state a fine for not having enough solar in their “portfolio.” In 2009, the utility companies pay a fine of $400 for each SREC that they are missing from their required portfolio at the end of the year. Therefore, the utility should be willing to pay a homeowner between $1 and $399 for each SREC so that they don’t have to pay the state $400 for each missing SREC.
Buying and selling SRECs is meant to be a market based system, so if there are a lot of SRECs available on the market (if lots of people put up solar panels), then the price of SRECs goes down. If there aren’t enough to fill the requirements of the utility companies, then the price of the SRECs will be high. Astrum Solar has been aggregating and selling SRECs in the Maryland market longer than anyone else. As the state's largest SREC aggregator, we can offer our customers the best price for their SRECs. To see what kind of rebates you can get with your SRECs, visit our Solar Calculator and choose whether you want to get the benefits of your SRECs in an up-front payment or over time. As time goes on, the SRECs are worth less and less, although the numbers that must be bought by utilities goes up. This is meant to stimulate the development of the solar market and to wean it off of rebates and incentives.
We also buy the SRECs from systems not installed by Astrum Solar, but of course at a lower price and with less flexibility than what we offer to our own customers. To see our external SREC aggregating business, click here:
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