The D-REC Initiative from Positive Capital Partners and South Pole

Today, I'm talking with Paul Needham and Ricky Buch from Positive Capital Partners. EnAccess is one of the funders of a project they are working on, together with South Pole, called the D-REC Initiative.

The D-REC, or Distributed Renewable Energy Certificate is being created to solve a problem that will have a direct benefit for Energy Access project developers and for corporates who want the biggest return on their investment in renewable energy in terms of climate impact.
In a place like California, a homeowner who installs solar panels on their house can actually sell the renewable energy that those panels create, creating a way to make money. There is no equivalent to this for DRE developers working in off grid locations, which basically means the energy access industry hasn’t yet been able to tap into the already-existing demand for renewable energy attributes. And on the other side, corporates haven’t had the chance to make the kind of climate impact that they could be making, if they were to have a certifiable way of investing into distributed renewable energy. This is where we need the D-REC: an open source, internationally accepted market instrument which can validate, and put a real monetary value on the environmental benefit provided by DRE systems.
In this conversation, Paul and Ricky talk about how they got this Initiative off the ground and why Open Source is so important for its' success.
Links:
enaccess.org/drecs
d-recs.energy
D-RECs on GitHub
Energy Web Foundation Origin
EnAccess blog post

EnAccess was the first to step in with funding for this project from, and we are really happy to currently be joined by the Shell Foundation, Good Energies Foundation, Signify Foundation, GIZ-DeveloPPP, the UK's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), UNDP, the IFC, and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC).