Every claim on this page checked against primary sources on July 29, 2026

SRECs explained

Two questions, not one

Almost every explanation of solar certificates runs the two questions together. The state pages on this site kept turning up cases where they come apart, so it is worth separating them properly:

1. Do you own them? Some states say so in statute or rule. Some say so with conditions attached. Some are silent, which means it is decided by whatever your contract says — and a contract you have not read.
2. Is there a buyer? This depends on whether the state has a renewable portfolio standard creating compliance demand, and whether that standard is still climbing or has run out of years.

The table answers only the second question, because that is the one the state data holds as a structured field. The first is set out per state on the state pages, and the range is wider than you would expect.

The two states worth putting side by side

These two cases are the reason this page exists, and between them they cover most of what can go wrong with a certificate.

Nebraska: perfect title, no market

Nebraska has the flattest statement of certificate ownership we found anywhere. Fourteen words, no conditions, no exceptions:

Compare that to Ohio's rule, which says the credits are the customer-generator's "unless otherwise contracted" — an escape hatch a salesperson can drive through — or Missouri's statute, which makes them initially the customer-generator's but transferred them to the utility for ten years if you took a solar rebate. Nebraska's sentence has none of that.

And Nebraska has no renewable portfolio standard, so nothing in the state obliges anyone to buy one. You own something with clean title and no buyer. The Nebraska page is here.

Ohio: an asset with an end date

Ohio goes the other way and is the more consequential case, because on paper it looks like the best of both.

Ohio's commission rule states that renewable energy credits "shall be the property of the customer-generator unless otherwise contracted," which is a real answer to the ownership question. Ohio Admin. Code 4901:1-10-28 And Ohio has a renewable portfolio standard, so there is compliance demand.

The problem is the standard's arithmetic. Ohio's benchmark requires 8.5% by the end of 2026 — and the table has no year after 2026, while the solar-specific column reads 0% for every year in it. Ohio Rev. Code 4928.64 So Ohio hands you a certificate and, in the same body of law, schedules the end of the market for it. The state page states that as a statutory end date rather than as a price prediction, because a price prediction is not something we can source.

Where the demand is actually durable

Two states on this site have obligations that are not running out, and both are worth knowing about for the opposite reason to Ohio.

Missouri's standard came from Proposition C, adopted by the voters in 2008. It requires at least 15% of sales from renewable energy in every calendar year beginning in 2021, with no later benchmark and no termination date in the section — and at least 2% of that requirement must come from solar specifically, so the demand is solar-shaped rather than generic. Energy generated inside Missouri also counts at 1.25 kilowatt-hours per kilowatt-hour for compliance. Mo. Rev. Stat. § 393.1030

Maine's is climbing rather than expiring: its Class IA requirement rises year on year through the 2030s, and the commission's own rule adds a protection worth having — "Renewable energy credits shall not be transferred to the transmission and distribution utility." 35-A M.R.S. § 3210 Me. P.U.C. Chapter 313

Neither of those is a promise that a homeowner can capture the value. It is a statement that the demand side exists and is not scheduled to stop, which is a necessary condition rather than a sufficient one.

The question to ask before you sign

In practice the most common way a homeowner loses their certificates is not a statute. It is a contract.

Ohio's "unless otherwise contracted" is explicit about this. Missouri's rebate condition transferred them for ten years to anyone who took the money. And in shared or subscribed solar the sponsor commonly keeps them — Maine's Office of the Public Advocate warns subscribers about exactly that, because a subscriber who assumed otherwise is not, in the state's accounting, using renewable energy at all.

So the question is short and you should ask it in writing: who keeps the renewable energy certificates, for how long, and what are they worth to you? If the answer is "the installer" or "the sponsor," that is not necessarily wrong — it may be priced into what you are paying — but it should be a decision rather than a discovery.

What this page does not cover yet

• What a certificate is actually worth anywhere. We have not published a price in any state, because prices move and because none of the primary sources we read publishes one a homeowner could rely on. This page explains the mechanism and deliberately quotes no figure.
• Registry mechanics. How a household actually registers a system, gets certificates issued and finds a counterparty is unverified in every state on this site, including the four with a market. Verifying that demand exists is not the same as verifying that a homeowner can reach it, and we have deliberately not implied the second from the first.
• Voluntary and multi-state routes. In several states the open question is whether a homeowner could register with a voluntary registry and sell into another state's compliance market. It is plausible in some footprints and was not researched in any of them. Alaska is a special case — its grids are not synchronously connected to the Lower 48, which makes the question genuinely different rather than merely unresearched.
• Thirty-eight states. The table covers the 12 states with data files on this site. Several states not on it are known for active certificate markets; their absence here means we have not read them, not that they have nothing.

Each of those is queued. When one is verified it will appear above with its own date.