The Corporate Renewable Energy Aggregation Group
This month five major companies—Bloomberg, Cox Enterprises, Gap Inc., Salesforce.com, and Workday—signed a uniform agreement to purchase 42.5 megawatts (MW) of a 100 MW solar farm in North Carolina. Coordinated by LevelTen Energy, the companies (organized as the
Corporate Renewable Energy Aggregation Group) chose a uniform virtual power purchase agreement (VPPA) contract and a single, shared legal counsel to finalize the transaction: the first aggregation model of its kind.
Typical aggregation structures use “anchor” companies—where one of the buyers takes on the bulk of the capacity and responsibilities of the PPA—and usually consist of separate contracts. CEO of LevelTen, Bryce Smith: "Our vision here is to try to streamline as many parts of the process as we can, to reduce the friction so that we can bring more buyers—especially more smaller buyers—to the table.”
Rocky Mountain Institute: A Corporate Purchaser's Guide to Risk Mitigation
As corporate and industrial renewable energy procurement have expanded at a brisk pace, risk mitigation strategies have failed to keep up, according to a new report issued by the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI). The report,
A Corporate Purchaser’s Guide to Risk Mitigation, spells out the dangers of procuring renewable energy without effective stakeholder coordination, and provides strategies to offsetting risk.
The following chart illustrates a renewable energy market that has become much more diverse. According to the RMI, risk mitigation techniques should follow suit. An executive summary of the report can be found
here.
Who's Leading? The Corporate Climate Tracker Can Tell You
