REC to ReCert: Introducing Re-Certification to Empower Prosumer-driven Certificate Aggregators

Renewable Energy Certificate (REC) is a type of Energy Attribute Certificate (EAC) operating in North America. RECs operate in megawatt-hours (MWh), where each REC refers to the generation of 1 MWh of electricity from renewable sources. RECs offer a credible solution to greenwashing by ensuring transparency in renewable energy claims. However, the issuance against 1 MWh limits the applicability of REC to small-scale projects like residential solar panels. Moreover, the centralized management of RECs by existing Generation Information Systems (GIS) presents challenges to interoperability with other standards like I-REC and REGO. These limitations necessitate an improved solution that supports diverse and decentralized renewable energy production and associated certificates.We propose Re-Certified Renewable Energy Certificates (Re-Certs) to address the limitations of traditional RECs by enabling the issuance of sliceable granular certificates for smaller projects and ensuring interoperability through the use of Self-sovereign Identity (SSI). The issuance of ReCerts is a two-step process where our proposed prosumer-driven aggregators play a critical role by aggregating multiple ReCerts in the first step, followed by the issuance of ReCerts, after the successful completion of the second step of Re-Certification, by a registry. This decentralized approach empowers prosumers and democratizes access to renewable energy markets. We have also presented a comparative analysis of our proposed prosumer-driven aggregator with the existing centralized, hybrid, and DLT-driven aggregators to show its effectiveness in simplifying certificate management with reduced aggregation and operational costs.