REPORT

DRIVING IMPACT
THE CORPORATE
CONNECTION:
GOING BIG WITH
RENEWABLES
Scaling renewable energy among customers is
important, but residential customers—and going home
rooftop by home rooftop—are only half the story. Commercial
customers are the other half, and in 2014–15 we made significant inroads.
BUSINESS RENEWABLES
CENTER
After winning a Bloomberg New Energy
Finance FiRe Award in early 2014, we
officially launched the BRC in November
2014 at an invitation-only workshop in New
York City. Designed to accelerate corporate
purchasing of large-scale renewable energy—
especially utility-scale wind and solar—the
BRC's membership has quickly grown to
~60 major companies, ranging from bigname
corporate buyers such as eBay, General
Motors, HP, Kaiser Permanente, and Yahoo!
to renewable energy project developers.
The publicly traded companies of the BRC
have a collective market capitalization of
$2.14 trillion and consume 41.7 TWh of
electricity per year (equivalent to roughly 3.8
million American homes).
By combining market transparency,
knowledge-sharing among members, and
providing needs tools and resources, we're
speeding corporate renewable energy deals
so that more happen faster and easier. Our
target is 60 GW of new installed capacity in
the U.S. by 2025. Already, the market is taking
big steps in that direction, and the BRC and its
members are at the heart of the story. In 2014
corporations signed a record 1.2 GW of major
renewable energy deals, and corporations and
other institutional buyers accounted for nearly
25 percent of the new wind capacity installed in
the country. By August 2015, corporations had
already set another record, with 1.4 GW YTD.
Across the two years, BRC-affiliated companies
were part of 75 percent of those deals.
BLACK BEAR ENERGY
Commercial real estate portfolios total billions
of square feet across the U.S., plus much more
when you add in parking lots and other
space. There's a tremendous opportunity to
put all that square footage to good use for
solar PV, storage, and other technologies
that can benefit customers, the grid, and
the climate. That's why this fiscal year we
launched for-profit spinoff Black Bear Energy
to meet a market need: helping managers of
large real estate portfolios understand the
potential sitting under their noses (or over
their heads) and make the best investments.
Heading up Black Bear are the former
renewable energy leaders from Prologis and
Walmart, the top two corporations deploying
on-site solar PV in U.S. commercial buildings.
truSOLAR TAKES OFF
truSolar is a FICO-like risk score for
commercial-building solar PV projects.
We developed the system with Distributed
Sun, UL, and a consortium of partners.
Its credit screen helps to make good solar
projects great, and get great projects the best
financing through robust, comprehensive, yet
streamlined due diligence. That means more,
better, cheaper solar for everyone. In Spring
2014, truSolar took flight as the platform
behind beEdison, a solar diligence platform
that won a Bloomberg New Energy Finance
FiRe Award in April 2015.
“The BRC [makes] it easier for corporations to enter the renewables market...
each member can get immediate access to the cumulative knowledge and
wisdom of the industry.”
—Rob Threlkeld
Manager of Renewable Energy, General Motors
"The electricity system is shifting to clean. Despite the change in oil and gas
prices there is going to be a substantial buildout of renewable energy that is
likely to be an order of magnitude larger than the buildout of coal and gas."
—Michael Liebreich*
Advisory Board Chairman, Bloomberg New Energy Finance
ROCKY MOUNTAIN
IN STIT U TE
CARBON
WA R R O O M
ANNUAL REPORT | 26
*As quoted in his Future Energy Summit 2015 keynote address