Collaborative Renewable Energy Procurement
January 19, 2016
In the last newsletter we introduced our pursuit of the Green Ribbon Commission’s Renewable Energy Leadership Prize awarded to the most compelling example of large-scale (>10MW) renewable energy generation. We are honored to announce that we did successfully organize a consortium of ABC Members to submit to the Prize including: John Hancock Life Insurance, Boston Medical Center, Post Office Square Redevelopment Corporation, Liberty Mutual Insurance and a fifth party that has asked to remain confidential. With the help of renewable energy consultancy CustomerFirst Renewables, ABC issued a 100,000MWh request for proposals to the developer community on December 1st, 2015. We are pleased with the strong response the group has received, including highly competitive bids from Maine to Texas with pricing that vastly exceeded our expectations. ABC will be hosting a half-day workshop on February 1st for key stakeholders at participating companies to select a finalist project and conduct final due diligence on both price and non-price factors. We anticipate that this project alone has the potential to reduce the City of Boston’s greenhouse gas emissions by ~2% while offering significant annual savings on the participants electricity expenditure depending on the project the we select. ABC is incredibly grateful to Larry DiCara and Ruth Silman from Nixon Peabody, LLC for their assistance and guidance throughout this process and to the impressive leadership of those leading the charge at participating organizations. Finally, with the announcement of the extension of the federal Business Energy Investment Tax Credit at the end of 2015, ABC would be open to replicating this collaborative procurement model in 2016. If you’re interested please contact Garrett Sprague: gsprague@abettercity.org, 617-502-5245.
