The Coalition of On-Site Renewable Energy Users and Developers sought rehearing for the New York PSC's order setting the value for utility compensation to distributed energy resources, stating that the order provides ownership of DER RECs to the utilities.

"The Order establishes a confusing, conflicting and irrational set of rules governing the rights of private renewable project owners and customers to trade or sell their project’s environmental attributes or Renewable Energy Certificates ('RECs'), in the marketplace. Even a project that foregoes any payment for the value of its environmental attributes under the DER’s Value Stack formula does not have the right to receive tradable RECs in NYGATs or in the bilateral or voluntary markets," CORE said

Notably, CORE said, "based on the Commission’s August, 2016 Clean Energy Standards ('CES') Order, it appears that the value of a voluntary project’s RECs may be credited toward the utilities’ RES compliance obligations to reduce their REC purchase obligations."

As certain of the CES compliance tiers are now assigned directly to LSEs, with ESCOs responsible for their own procurement of CES resources for their own customers, an allocation of RECs to the utility for CES compliance may implicate the cost of default service and the price to compare, to the extent RECs are allocated to a CES obligation assigned to all LSEs (as opposed to legacy tiers assigned only to the utilities for all customers)

"By depriving project owners and users of the value of their RECs, the scheme is unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious and unduly discriminatory. The Commission should reconsider these aspects of the Order and adopt the simple principle that one MWH of renewable generation creates one REC certificate that can be sold, traded or retired in the REC owner’s discretion," CORE said

See CORE's rehearing request here