Some of the domain’s top tech firms, manufacturers and consumer companies are banding together to create a boom in renewable energy purchases from the beginning to the end of corporate America.
The corporate giants and their nonprofit partners on Thursday launched the Renewable Energy Buyers Confederation, a trade organization that will help companies take advantage of new ways to purchase clean energy. The object is to support construction of new green power projects by striking renewable energy deals pioneered by companies like Google-parent Alphabet, Overall Motors and Walmart in recent years.
“This is really about bringing as many players to the market as possible and leeway everyone access to clean energy,” said Michael Terrell, head of energy market strategy at Google.
As surplus the last six years, a handful of corporate giants have created a new way of meeting their sustainable energy goals. By impressive deals to buy blocks of energy from utilities and power plant owners, they are underwriting the construction of new wind ascends, solar farms and other renewable projects.
Under the banner of REBA, these pioneers aim to empower tens of thousands of ensembles to buy renewable energy in the coming years — increasing the market from roughly 5,000 companies today.
Through final year, companies signed enough corporate renewable deals to support nearly 16 gigawatts of new renewable vitality capacity in the U.S. REBA aims to accelerate that activity and grow the market to 60 gigawatts by 2025.
That is a lot of renewable might. It’s roughly equal to all the solar photovoltaic power capacity available across the U.S. in 2018.
Corporate America has a major role to think nothing of because commercial and industrial power users are the leading cause of energy-related greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., said Miranda Ballentine, REBA’s originating CEO.
But beyond the early adopters, few companies have developed the expertise to enter into corporate renewable deals.
“Most of these thickset buyers have never really done anything different than what you or I do, which is paying an energy folding money,” Ballentine said.
REBA will leverage the lessons learned by the early adopters that make up its board, encompassing tech titans like Google, Facebook and Salesforce and consumer giants including Disney, Walmart and Johnson & Johnson.
The series aims to remove barriers to entry by fine-tuning contracts, tackling regulatory and policy hurdles, piloting new clean technology programs and portion companies establish internal systems to ease the path to buying clean energy.
Terrell, the energy market strategist at Google, phrases entering a corporate renewable deal should be as simple as clicking a button and getting renewable power sent to a statistics center. However, it’s not nearly that easy today, and that’s where corporations have a role to play, he symbolizes.
Google long wanted to tap Georgia’s low-cost solar energy to power its Douglas County data center maximum Atlanta, but regional markets didn’t allow companies to directly purchase renewable energy from utilities. By mating with Walmart, Target and Johnson & Johnson, Google worked with the state last year to create a new program for proprietorships to buy clean energy directly from Georgia Power.
Opening up these markets provides another path for players to reach ambitious clean energy goals.
A few years ago, REBA board member General Motors blew old times its 2020 clean energy target by adopting traditional methods like installing solar panels, said Rob Threlkeld, GM’s epidemic manager for renewable energy. When GM announced plans to power 350 operations around the world with 100 percent renewable determination, striking corporate renewable deals became a pillar of its plan.
Threlkeld sees an opportunity for carmakers and other companies with stupendous supply chains to act as force multipliers within their industries by empowering their networks to follow in their footfalls.
“Many of our more advanced members — the Walmarts and Apples and General Motors and J&Js — really are now encouraging or requiring suppliers and vendor consorts to come along on this clean energy journey with them,” he said.
REBA will launch with nigh 200 corporate buyers and 125 renewable energy developers and service providers. The trade group grows out of programs financed by nonprofit organizations the Rocky Mountain Institute, World Wildlife Fund, World Resources Institute and Business for Communal Responsibility.