Solar Renewable Energy Certificate (SREC) is a way to measure the amount of clean electricity a solar power system produces. Power companies – the utilities like Eversource, National Grid, Western Massachusetts Electric – are required to produce a certain amount of clean energy, or to purchase it from those who build their own solar power system. The current price of an SREC-II (see below for explanation) can be found on SRECTrade.com – they are currently approximately $315/each.

Month Solar Radiation
(kWh/m2/day)
AC Energy
( kWh )
January 2.73 373
February 3.67 447
March 4.58 602
April 5.35 663
May 5.78 715
June 6.15 716
July 6.39 753
August 5.95 705
September 4.55 533
October 4 504
November 2.74 345
December 2.28 305
Annual 4.51 6,661

What this means in plain english: for every kWh you produce, in addition to saving $.18-24/kWh (your price of electricity), you receive a bonus of $.315/kWh because it is clean, locally produced electricity. That means you will receive $.49-$.55/kWh for the energy produced on your roof.

Currently, Massachusetts is in its second SREC program – known as SRECII. All future systems, until we reach 1600MW of solar power installed, are part of the SRECII program. The original program, SREC I, has sold out. If you’d like to read a more in-depth description visit this article at GreentechMedia.com.

Sign up for a weekly digest of solar industry news, delivered to your inbox every Tuesday.