12-stepping away from coal to solar through collaborative purchasing

12-stepping away from coal to solar through collaborative purchasingWhen you think of 12 steps, you may think of ending an addiction. While its usually for a drugs or a compulsion, on April 26, World Resources Institute (WRI) and Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network unveiled their new 12-step program for making it easier for companies and governments to get off coal buy using collective purchasing to reduce the cost of solar by up to 15 percent.

The groups released their collaborative 12-step guide and the accompanying report, “Purchasing Power: Best Practices Guide to Collaborative Solar Procurement,” at the Department of Energy’s Solar Cities America conference in Philadelphia, which will go on through April 28.

“This guide to collaborative solar purchasing represents a nationally significant approach to drive broad adoption of cost-effective renewable energy. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Green Power Partnership believes that effective application of the principles included in this guide will help protect public health by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, while also helping to expand the U.S. clean energy portfolio,” wrote Blaine Collison, EPA director of the Green Power Partnership, in the forward of the report.

“The authors, their respective organizations, and the groups participating in the examples are critical, and lessons from this valuable resource should be factored into all future regional solar initiatives,” Collison said.

The report looked at two case studies of collaborative purchasing of solar through uniform power-purchase agreements. The Joint Venture led Silicon Valley Collaborative Renewable Energy Procurement Project resulted in a total of 14 megawatts of solar installed at 70 local government sites. While the WRI led Collaborative Solar Project resulted in 1,000 megawatts of solar being installed by businesses, including Staples, Walmart, Intel, and Hewlett-Packard in California.

“What we found is there are potential efficiencies [of scale] in transportation, labor costs, and standardizing the legal contract,” said report author Jenna Goodward. “Collaborative purchasing not only saves you costs on the price of energy [under a PPA], but also on administration costs.”

On average, the cities bundled under the same PPA spent 75 percent less on administrative costs for solar projects, according to Goodward.

Governments, from the local level to the federal level, can have a part in helping collaborative solar projects get off the ground by helping to facilitate the projects and helping with collective bargaining.

“We wouldn’t really advocate for government buildings to be grouped with businesses in the same bundle,” Goodward said. “Simply because they’re quite different in how they procure their energy.”

Governments have different rules than private industry.

To account for that, the 12 steps are kind of a generic blueprint, according to Goodward. From there, it’s broken down into recommendations for the private sector and different recommendations for governments, which can be scaled either to local governments or the federal level.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory also released a report about how homeowners can use the collaborative purchasing process to lower the costs of solar as well.

Goodward and two of her coauthors, Benjamin Foster and Caroline Judy, will hold a discussion panel at the conference on Thursday regarding the report and their work with collective purchasing.

“It’s nice that I was able to be on the panel with two co-authors,” she said.