The Delaware solar renewable energy credit (SREC) program, SRECDelaware, recently announced the results of its 2016 Procurement. This year, procurement was marked by a higher than anticipated volume of SRECs produced by new systems between 25kW and 2MW in capacity. In response, Delaware’s state utility, Delmarva, decided to buy the resulting 2446 excess SRECs. The overall outcome of Delaware’s procurement oversubscription was a slight price drop from last year for SRECs in the oversubscribed tiers.
What is the Procurement Program?
Delaware has a unique structure of SREC procurement that allows customers to bid competitively on SREC purchase contracts with the Delmarva. These contracts were meant to address price volatility in the DE SREC market. Accordingly, solar energy systems in DE are categorized into one of five tiers based on system size and installation date. Customers in each tier bid on contracts with Delmarva to sell their SRECs at a fixed price. The customer with the lowest priced bid in each tier wins the contract. Additionally, Delmarva can buy up to 6,000 more SRECs from customers after all the tiers have been sold.
See below for a chart detailing the tiers for DE SREC Procurement:
*N-1, E-1, and E-2 compete for the same pool of 4,400 SRECs
How is this year’s procurement different from years past? At the most basic level Delmarva buys more SRECs and tier cutoffs have evolved. Delmarva can now purchase up to 6,000 additional SRECs after establishing its 20-year contracts with bid winners. In the past, Delmarva was limited to a purchase of 3,000 additional SRECs. Furthermore, the DE SREC program has changed the nameplate capacity cutoff for systems in E-1 to 25kW, rather than 30kW. Additionally, this year’s contracts last for 20 years. Customers sell their SRECs to Delmarva at the bid price for the first 10 years and then for $35 per SREC for the last 10 years of the contract.
As discussed earlier, Delmarva was allowed to purchase up to 6,000 additional SRECs after establishing contracts. However, Delmarva actually purchased nearly 2,500 SRECs more than that limit by purchasing all SRECs priced below $95 from the oversubscribed tiers of N-2 and N-3. SRECDelaware cites that the undersubscribed tiers N-1, E-1, and E-2 were filled with low-priced excess N-3 bids, since tiers N-3 and N-2 had more SRECs than Delmarva originally intended to purchase. In years past, none of the tiers have been undersubscribed.
Bid Pricing Results
SRECDelaware’s 2016 Procurement resulted in a bid price increase for tiers N-1, E-1, and E-2, but a decrease for the oversubscribed tiers, N-2 and N-3. Below are the results of this year’s procurement, as well as the changes in average bid price over time.
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