You don't lose the production itself. Your system earns SRECs (Solar Renewable Energy Certificates — the certificates your system earns for the clean power it produces) going right back to the day it was connected to the grid, in every state RECmint works in. Signing up later doesn't erase that history.

What you can lose is the ability to sell some of those SRECs. Every market sets a date before which SRECs, though genuinely earned, can never be sold — and that date usually depends on when your registration goes in.

A Pennsylvania system connected in March, with its application filed in September, earns SRECs from March but can only sell them from September onward.

That September start only holds if the application reaches approval within six months of filing. If something holds it up — a document we're waiting on, a question Pennsylvania asks — and it isn't resolved in time, Pennsylvania closes the application and the system has to file again, starting from the new month. Answering our requests quickly is what protects your earning start date.

How much of your earlier production can be sold depends on the program your system registers into, and the cutoff differs by market — Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia and Washington DC each set it differently.

The practical answer is the same in all of them: the sooner your registration goes in, the more of your earlier production you can sell. There is no waiting period that makes it better to delay.

Send us your documents as soon as you have them. In some markets, the cutoff is set the moment we file your application, so every week of delay can cost sellable SRECs. Nothing about registering earlier reduces what you earn.