[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Jasmine (YC S22) - Automating REC complia...
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Launch HN: Jasmine (YC S22) - Automating REC compliance and payouts
for solar
Hi HN -- we're Nathalie, Dalton, Vince, and Matt, and we're
launching Jasmine Energy (https://www.jasmine.energy), a tool that
helps residential and commercial solar owners automatically
register their systems, track energy generation, and get paid for
Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs). RECs are tradeable
certificates for clean electricity, issued by energy markets across
the US. Most people with rooftop or small commercial solar have
never heard of them, let alone claimed them, but they're real! They
are typically bought by utilities or companies to meet climate
targets. The problem is, the process to claim and sell RECs is a
mess--designed decades ago for utility-scale players, not
individuals or small businesses. To register a system and start
claiming RECs, you usually have to: Navigate one of 10+ regional
REC registries, each with its own documentation, forms, and rules;
Pull generation data from your inverter or utility, format it, and
submit it manually; Try to find a buyer (often through a broker or
opaque exchange) and negotiate payment. That takes weeks if not
months for a single system, and most people give up. As a result,
millions of solar installations leave income on the table every
year. We started Jasmine Energy after seeing this firsthand: some
of us worked in energy startups, and others watched our parents
install solar but never claim a single REC. Jasmine automates all
of this. Our platform: Extracts metadata from your solar documents
using AI and auto-registers your system in the correct registry;
Connects to your inverter to submit generation data and verify REC
eligibility; Lists RECs for sale through partners, tracks the sale
process, and issues payouts--all through a single dashboard. This
domain is a good fit for automation and LLMs--not to generate text,
but to (1) structure unstructured documents, (2) interact with
legacy government websites where there's no API, and (3) deal with
repetitive bureaucratic language. To be clear, we're not trying to
"squeeze public funding" or take unfair advantage of the system.
REC sales happen in voluntary and compliance markets (usually
funded by corporate buyers and utilities, not taxpayers). Jasmine
doesn't create or inflate incentives--it just helps people claim
what already exists but is hard to access. We're making the REC
market more efficient. RECs have been one of the most effective
and widely adopted incentive systems to drive grid decarbonization.
We're excited to be making them easier to access. The product is
live now for solar owners in PJM, M-RETS, and ERCOT territories
(more coming soon). If you already have solar, you can upload your
docs and start the process at https://assets.jasmine.energy. We'd
love feedback from this community--on the product, the market, or
any edge cases you think we should worry about. And of course we'll
be happy to answer any questions!
Author : mmayberry
Score : 16 points
Date : 2025-04-16 13:11 UTC (3 hours ago)
| solardev wrote:
| I hope this doesn't sound rude, but I'm trying to understand the
| model here.
|
| Does this mean that instead of incentivizing new utility-scale
| buildouts, you've now created a credits marketplace where no new
| solar is added but existing small rooftop installations are
| suddenly eligible, flooding the market with an artificially
| increased supply?
|
| So companies can buy RECs that don't actually increase the
| installed solar base, claim that it offsets their pollution, but
| in reality it's just some accounting trickery that's newly
| counting solar that's already built?
|
| That's what it sounds like at first glance, but maybe I'm
| misunderstanding?
|
| Maybe in the long run, if the automation itself drives further
| adoption and increases solar uptake, it's a net positive..?
| adamsch wrote:
| Indeed, RECs are known to have very little additionality and
| there is a ton of research questioning their role in
| decarbonization.
|
| "A number of studies have zeroed in on the influence of
| voluntary RECs--those purchased by private customers--on
| renewable energy production and have gathered significant
| evidence to suggest that these certificates have had little to
| no impact. One of these studies, led by researchers at
| Princeton, Harvard, and UCLA, for example, found that if the
| power market for voluntary RECs did not exist, "the amount of
| electricity generated by wind power in the United States would
| be little different than what we actually see today."
|
| A paper published in 2022 in Nature which received significant
| attention from the media argued that due to the drop in the
| prices of RECs in recent years, the revenue associated with
| these certificates is insufficient to promote an increase in
| green energy production. The paper concludes that while the
| group of companies being analyzed reported a combined 30.7%
| reduction in emissions resulting from their REC purchases, the
| actual reduction was closer to 9.9%."
|
| https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/commentary/blog/renewable-e...
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01379-5
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| This criticism seems circular to me. If the certificates are
| too difficult to claim, then of course they don't have the
| desired effect of acting as an incentive.
| ncapati wrote:
| Totally agree with this take--it highlights a core issue
| we've seen over and over again. It's no surprise RECs
| struggle to live up to their potential as market signals.
| We think part of the solution is usability. If more people
| could actually see what they're buying, why it matters, and
| how it fits into the bigger system, the signal could become
| stronger over time.
| ncapati wrote:
| Thanks for raising this--these studies are important and
| we've read them too.
|
| Our goal isn't to resolve the long-standing debate around
| additionality, but to solve a more immediate and pragmatic
| problem: helping individuals and companies claim their
| property - in this case RECs.
|
| For most people and businesses, participating in commodity
| markets (where RECs are bought and sold) is a black box.
| We're focused on creating infrastructure and tools usable so
| they can. Whether you're buying RECs or exploring other
| environmental commodities, we think the user experience and
| the clarity around what you own and what you're buying matter
| deeply.
| ncapati wrote:
| Existing small rooftops have always been eligible for RECs, we
| didn't create this incentive - it has always been available to
| this segment. But, the administrative burden put on resi solar
| installers and developers to manually register thousands of
| rooftop systems have made it impossible for these small
| distributed energy systems to claim them, until Jasmine. REC
| revenue has been knowingly or unknowingly money left on the
| table that could help lower system cost upfront or generate
| monthly passive income.
|
| Non utility has been eligible for RECs since the market was
| created in the early 2000s and with rooftop solar installation
| sky rocketing in recent years hitting 5 million solar installs,
| where more than 90% of those installs are on rooftops - this
| creates an urgency around solving this problem.
|
| We're automating REC admin so that residential and commercial,
| the small scale solar segment including third party owned
| systems (leases and PPA) have easier access to the market by
| automating registration and simplifying selling.
|
| I only see rooftop solar segment expanding - there's a huge
| push on the state level and at the utilities to support
| distributed generation because of the additional advantage it
| has on the environment, we want to incentivize more rooftop
| solar because rooftops already exist rather than taking up land
| to build solar farms, here's a good article on this
|
| https://publicinterestnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07...
| tdaltonc wrote:
| I think it's unlikely that much of the total capacity
| registered by Jasmine will be pre-2025 builds. So I think your
| last line is the most likely outcome. More access to the
| program means more efficient use of the incentive, means
| (hopefully) more aggressive RPS timelines.
|
| Why do I think that we're unlikely to see a lot of pre-2025
| builds?
|
| 1) Solar is on an exponential deployment curve, so by
| definition there's much more capacity in front of us than there
| is behind us.
|
| 2) As a practical matter, the go-to-market motion of on-
| boarding newly built systems is much easier than the go-to-
| market motion of on-boarding legacy systems. Channel parters
| (solar installers, solar point-of-sale systems, solar
| financiers) all deal with new systems, and new systems are top
| of mind for recent buyers. Getting our product in front of old
| system owners is just much harder.
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