Each NFT is tied to a token bound account holding Outflow tokens, one per verified megawatt hour (MWh) of real historical solar generation. Our contracts have deduplication logic so only one token can ever be minted per MWh, verified through an oracle that reads the system's own monitoring hardware (SolarEdge, Enphase, etc.) directly.
We initially explored tokenizing these as Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs), 1 MWh happens to be the standard REC unit too, but we've held off on making that claim until we get legal advice. If we say these are actual RECs, that pulls in the whole legal framework around the voluntary REC market, accredited registries, chain of custody, avoiding double counting against any state REC program a system might already be enrolled in. But our customers own their solar RECs and have assigned us the right to tokenize them, so we could technically make that claim. We also only operate in territories where owners hold their RECs by default. Should we make that claim? Anyone working in blockchain or the environmental asset market who could weigh in?
Registries today download solar production data into a csv file and email it to trading platform companies, expensive and slow, and most residential or small commercial owners can't navigate them or don't produce enough value to make it worth registering.
We're working with solar installers and system owners on this. Roughly ~4,000 solar panels in our pilot right now, focused on distributed solar systems. We're dropping our first 32 NFTs with Outflow soon.