Turning Potential into Reality: What You Need to Monitor Your Solar Portfolio and Generate RECs

In the first entry of the Popular RECs series, we explored how Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) can become a new source of income for a solar portfolio. But once you identify this potential, a key question arises: what do you need to start issuing RECs?

To turn potential of RECs into real income for your solar portfolio, you must consider these three key elements:

• Rights and ownership: Secure the rights to the environmental attribute, clearly defining in contracts who retains ownership of these certificates.

• Registration process: Registering solar sites for REC issuance requires detailed documentation, and it's important to centralize information and ensure it's correct.

• Efficient monitoring: A centralized monitoring platform facilitates the collection of energy generation data, maximizing the potential for REC issuance.

Rights to the Environmental Attribute: The Starting Point

A Renewable Energy Certificate (REC) represents the environmental attribute associated with 1 MWh of energy generated from renewable sources. This enables better traceability of clean energy within the grid. To sell RECs, securing the commercialization rights to this environmental attribute is essential. While the owner of a solar asset typically retains these rights, financing contracts and power purchase agreements (PPAs) don’t always make this explicit. For turnkey solar system developers, REC rights usually transfer to the system owner unless a specific agreement allows the developer to retain them.

If you want to benefit from this additional income stream, it’s strategic to structure agreements that allow you to share the value of RECs with clients. This can take the form of:

• Discounts on operation and maintenance services

• Incentives to expand installed capacity

• Partial coverage of spare parts or system improvements

The purpose of commercializing RECs is to accelerate the energy transition. As a developer, reinvesting this income into system performance and operational improvements strengthens both your business and your impact. To ensure a smooth REC commercialization process:

• Define rights from the beginning. Clearly establish who retains the RECs in your contracts with clients and financiers.

• Include clauses in PPAs. If retaining REC rights is part of your business model, make sure provisions reflect this.

• Negotiate transfers in turnkey sales. Explore strategies to share the value of RECs with clients to create win-win agreements.

Clarifying REC ownership early on prevents roadblocks and allows you to strategically leverage their value.

Simplifying the Registration of Your Sites

Once you’ve secured the rights to commercialize RECs from your solar portfolio, the next step is registering your sites. While the registration and issuance process may seem complex due to varying standards and data requirements, understanding the basics can simplify the path forward.

Internationally, the I-TRACK Standard Foundation is the most widely used standard, while in Colombia and some Central American countries, Ecogox also plays a role. Before a site can issue RECs, it must be registered and audited by a local issuer—Normex in Mexico and Fundación Ecsim or Ecogox in Colombia. This requires detailed documentation, including installed capacity and installation data, GPS location and site photographs, Meter evidence, serial numbers and inverter brand details, among others.

Although most solar developers already have this data, it’s often scattered across different formats, making registration cumbersome and costly. To streamline certification:

• Keep technical documentation organized. Ensure easy access to all required data.

• Centralize portfolio information. Avoid scattered files across multiple locations.

At Popular Power, we simplify this process by centralizing your documentation, identifying applicable standards, and managing audits—accelerating the registration of your sites so you can start generating RECs faster.

Monitoring Energy Generation

Once your sites are registered, continuous monitoring of energy generation is key. Periodic reporting is required for REC certification, but without a centralized platform, developers often struggle to collect data from multiple sources—especially if their portfolio includes different inverter brands. This can make issuing RECs slow and inefficient.

Popular Power eliminates this challenge. Our platform seamlessly integrates energy generation data in one place, regardless of the inverter brands you use. Plus, our advanced analytics help you, identify performance improvement opportunities, schedule strategic maintenance, and ensure each installation operates at peak efficiency. This translates to higher energy generation and more RECs available for commercialization.

To optimize monitoring:

• Integrate your inverter data. Avoid manual data collection from multiple platforms.

• Centralize real-time information. Gain full visibility into your systems’ performance.

• Use predictive analysis. Anticipate maintenance needs and enhance efficiency.

With Popular Power, monitoring is no longer a bottleneck—it’s a competitive advantage that maximizes both your energy production and REC revenue.

Success Case: Navajo Power Home

One example of this in action is Navajo Power Home, a solar developer installing residential and commercial systems across the Navajo Nation. Individually, each site has a relatively small installed capacity, but collectively, their annual generation represents a substantial volume of RECs. Through Popular Power’s platform, Navajo Power Home has streamlined the registration and sale of these RECs, unlocking new revenue streams for their projects and communities. Stay tuned for more success stories in this series!

Turning Potential into Reality

Turning REC potential into real income requires three key steps:

1. Securing the rights to the environmental attribute

2. Registering your sites correctly

3. Efficiently monitoring energy generation

   
   

While these steps can seem complex, the right tools make them both accessible and profitable. At Popular Power, we simplify each stage: clarifying rights management, centralizing all necessary documentation, integrating generation data from multiple inverters, and connecting you with buyers to maximize REC value. What was once a fragmented technical process is now a streamlined strategy to boost your solar portfolio’s profitability.

Are you ready to unlock this new revenue stream? Popular Power is here to guide you every step of the way—turning challenges into opportunities and potential into tangible results.