Five Global Brands Close New Aggregation Deal with BayWa r.e

Bloomberg, Cox Enterprises, Gap Inc., Salesforce, and Workday, with guidance from LevelTen Energy and its renewable energy procurement platform, closed 42.5MW of a 100MW North Carolina solar project by global renewable energy developer, service provider and wholesaler, BayWa r.e. This group of companies, coming together as the Corporate Renewable Energy Aggregation Group, is the first example of companies aggregating similar, relatively small amounts of renewable energy demand to collaboratively enter into a virtual power purchase agreement (VPPA), collectively acting as the anchor tenant for a large offsite renewable energy project. The unprecedented coordination between five international businesses lays the groundwork for other corporates to procure renewable energy cooperatively, maximizing value and reducing risk.

The five members of the group, with support from the Business Council on Climate Change (BC3) and the Business Renewables Center (BRC), began collaborating in late 2017.  Many potential renewable energy purchasers have historically been faced with a key problem: businesses looking to procure smaller energy loads have been unable to contract directly with large offsite renewable energy projects due to limited energy demand. This has so far restricted business’s ability to catalyze the development of new renewable energy projects. To solve this problem, the group evaluated several mechanisms for aggregating smaller amounts of renewable energy demand to afford them the collective buying power that is typically necessary to contract directly with a large offsite renewable energy project.

The eventual solution chosen by the group was a uniform VPPA contract and a single, shared legal counsel to negotiate and finalize the transaction. This helped to further streamline the final phases of the transaction. The new, simple structure allows the buyers to contract for relatively small pieces of the BayWa r.e. solar project, keep transaction costs low, and learn best practices from each other. The group hopes other buyers see this structure as a viable way to enter the large offsite renewable energy market, helping to accelerate corporate procurement of clean energy and expand renewables deployment in the U.S.

The deal was coordinated by LevelTen Energy, which aggregates both buyers and sellers across national and regional renewable energy portfolios. Through the LevelTen Energy renewable energy procurement platform, buyers and sellers provide dozens of key criteria related to their purchase needs and project specifics, triggering LevelTen’s proprietary Dynamic Matching Engine to process this information in real time to create the ideal aggregation options for all parties. The LevelTen Energy platform processes more than 8 million data points across nearly 1,600 projects on a daily basis to help all energy buyers evaluate value, risk and other critical criteria required to properly pursue renewable energy procurement opportunities.