Solar REC Revenue Calculator

A REC represents the environmental attribute of having generated 1 MWh of renewable electricity, which is legally and financially separate from the electricity itself under most REC market structures. That's why the calculator treats REC income as entirely additive to whatever energy revenue or savings your project earns — the same MWh generates both an energy value and, on top of it, a certificate you can sell separately.

Voluntary-market REC prices have historically trended downward as renewable supply has grown faster than voluntary demand, so a negative escalation rate lets you model a market you expect to soften over your contract term rather than assuming prices only ever rise. Entering a negative percentage compounds the REC price downward each year the same way a positive percentage would compound it upward.

No — it applies a single fixed EPA national-average emissions factor (0.4275 metric tons of CO2 per MWh) to your production regardless of where the project is located. A project displacing a coal-heavy regional grid offsets meaningfully more actual carbon than this average suggests, while one displacing an already-clean grid offsets less, so treat this figure as a rough national benchmark rather than a site-specific carbon accounting number.

It takes the total net REC revenue over your entire contract period (after fees, degradation, and any price escalation are applied year by year) and divides it first by the number of contract years and then by your system's capacity in kW, giving a single normalized figure. It's useful for comparing REC value across projects of different sizes or contract lengths on a common per-kW, per-year basis.