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!
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..?
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.
That's a very fair response and analysis. Thank you!
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
This is really great! I have solar on my roof at home but am not sure who owns the RECs - me, the installer, the utility company, rando Jon Doe? Does your platform provide a method to confirm that as well?
Yep! If you upload the documents requested by the app, we are able to determine that one way or the other.
Sometimes that's explicitly in the documents and other times it's based on the jurisdiction of the solar installation.
First, it's great to see new stuff happening in the solar space, and helping use incentives that are there. I wish you success!
> 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.
This isn't a criticism of what you're doing, but a more general gripe/musing about the wider software and AI ecosystem. I've seen this in my own work too. I feel very unhappy that we are using complex, nondeterministic, power-hungry "intelligent" machines to solve the problem of... unstructured data. Instead of... structuring the data.
I know you can't solve that problem. But nevertheless, wouldn't it be better for society as a whole if "we" agreed to make data accessible in machine-readable ways that don't require human-like agents to piece together the mess?
This is a writ-large version of the joke about writing an email in bullet points, inflating it to paragraphs using an LLM, then the receiver summarising the paragraphs back to bullet points using an LLM.
This is my roman empire, and I go back and forth on my conclusions at least once a day.
On one hand, clarity and structure make a platform that's easy to build and collaborate on. If the system enforces the rules, and the rules are a good model of reality, everyone knows what to expect. Pushing the world forward one ISO standard at a time.
On the other hand, greatness can't be planned. By the time we know enough to make a plan, the really important stuff has already happened. "Everyone" expected solar to always be a somewhat marginal energy source, so why spend a lot of time standardizing formats?
And it's not like this is a just a thing in tech. Buildings used to be fine tolerance artifacts built by craftsman. Now we slap them together prefab parts and just add more caulk until it works.
I'm genuinely shocked that the electrical grid works. And the more I learn about how it works, the more shocked I become.
Are we losing our attention spans as a rational response to a world that changing faster and faster; or is our lack of attention creating a less stable world?
Ultimately, we make progress not when the code runs fast, but when the humans run fast; but sometimes that means the code needs to run fast too.
And thank you for the well wishes!
> This is my roman empire
Haven't heard this said before, but is this a reference to how often men think about Rome? That's very amusing.
RDF is my Roman empire. It's the original and best Web 3: open-world knowledge graphs. It feels like if the ecosystem around that developed better, it would provide a way to interchange data without having to do Big Standards Up Front.
Any org could publish data under their own schemas, communities could start to converge on the most helpful ones, provide translations between terms, and gradually things would evolve, without having to all agree first. RDF provides a baseline for interop, on top of which specific worlds of knowledge can evolve.
I work in solar software too and every day I am sad that manufacturers provide their datasheets as PDFs. Not even Excel files.
> I'm genuinely shocked that the electrical grid works. And the more I learn about how it works, the more shocked I become.
Amen to that.
Have you reached out to the folks at https://gosolarapp.org/ to see if there are any potential partnership or integration opportunities?
Congrats on the launch!
Thank you! We'll check them out.
This is amazing and so necessary to drive down the cost of solar and speed up its adoption. Godspeed!
Thank you!
Congrats on the launch!
Thank you!
What is a 'climate goal'?
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