Collaborative Renewables Procurement
July 18, 2016
With the help of renewable energy consultancy CustomerFirst Renewables, A Better City issued a 100,000MWh request for proposals to the developer community on December 1st, 2015. We received a highly competitive response with bids from Maine to Texas with pricing that vastly exceeded our expectations. The A Better City CO-REP now include a large university as well as a hospital, parking garage and park and commercial real estate assets. The finalist project is a 60MWac solar farm located in the northeast corner of North Carolina. It is expected to produce 150,000MWh per year and participants will be purchasing power from the project at a fixed price lower than the current wholesale market rate for 25 years.
Additionally, Garrett Sprague represented the project on a panel focused on aggregating demand at the Washington DC convening of the Association of Climate Change Officers. Stakeholders have been invited by the project developers to take a helicopter tour of the site which is scheduled for July 21st. A Better City 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, A Better City would be open to replicating this collaborative procurement model in 2016/2017.
