Technology Overview
The D-REC Initiative is a not-for-profit, multi-stakeholder, industry-led initiative. Our membership includes climate and impact oriented philanthropic organisations, climate investors, leading global corporations, international standards organisations, technology providers, international development organisations, environmental market agents, sustainability advisors, renewable energy industry associations and project developers in emerging markets.
A D-REC is a third party-certified, verifiable, trade able market instrument that can mobilize new sources of capital to support the deployment of newly distributed renewable energy.
The D-REC Platform was designed to facilitate the issuance of International RECs (I-RECs) from D-REC certificates through an automated approach. Current environmental markets require a largely manual exchange of data, such as generation reports, in order to receive renewable energy certificates. D-RECs utilize technology to overcome the challenges prohibiting small devices from accessing environmental markets. The primary value propositions for a technical solution include:
Improved discoverability: Technology can make it easier for buyers and other stakeholders to discover projects that are closely aligned with their purchase criteria through a standardized data model that describes a variety of DRE assets.
Lower transaction costs: Automating validation can shorten the time needed to issue certificates and thereby lower transaction costs.
Scalability for smaller devices: Aggregation allows developers to achieve scale that is material to buyers, allows for quicker monetization cycles, and ensures issuance frequency through unreliable data connections.
Clear traceability and provenance: Buyers can streamline their procurement reporting by utilizing the public ledger to document data origination and verification; the public ledger also reduces the risk of double-counting as all tokens (which represent I-REC issuance requests) are publicly discoverable.
The D-REC Platform supports account and device registration, data verification, token minting, and I-REC issuances. The platform has two primary user categories: developers, and buyers.
Purpose
D-REC is a not-for-profit platform to facilitate the secure and authentic transactions of RECs.
RECs can be reserved and monitored via this platform and Buyers can get the I-REC standard certified RECs.
Expected Users
The expected users of this platform are REC developers, REC Buyers and Intermediary organisations.
There will be multiple users under all the above mentioned categories for an instance, there will be multiple Device managers, site managers and administrators.
DREC Project Developers
Developers will use the D-REC platform to register devices and submit meter reads for verification. Simply doing so will not automatically lead to certification under I-REC; there
must be a buyer that is present that has set a “reservation” (which is an issuance request done by “reserving” devices and seeking the certification of their meter reads over a certain period) in order for the data to then be tokenized and submitted to the I-REC Evident registry.
Developers first create an account on the D-REC Platform - login credentials are through a username and a password. Once they are logged in, they can submit device registrations, which subsequently will allow them to submit meter reads for certification and enable prospective buyers to discover those projects.
REC Buyers
Buyers will have a different interface when interacting with the D-REC system. The primary objective will be to set and review “reservations.” These are ways for the buyer to identify specific devices from which they would like to secure RECs - this process “reserves” the device, therefore preventing additional buyers from also securing RECs (note: partial certification is something that will be addressed in a future release).
The buyer first specifies certain parameters for the reservation, including the total volume of RECs they are seeking to purchase, the start and end period for which the data should be certified, and the issuance frequency (how frequent does the buyer want the issuance requests to occur). The buyer then selects specific devices to be associated with that reservation, which as noted earlier will remove that device from the list of available devices.