Corporate buy-in counts

Growing corporate presence in power markets will boost clean energy

Companies have been buying renewable energy to power their operations for decades. At first, this was done at a very small and highly distributed scale, such as attaching solar power to remote monitoring systems for pipelines. In the early 2000s, companies began to build their own rooftop solar assets to power buildings, or contract with a third party to meet the same demand onsite.

Starting around 2010, companies began to do something different: they signed power purchase agreements with large, offsite renewable energy assets connected to the wholesale power grid. These assets were identical to anything built by a utility or independent power producer and they put power into the grid in the same way – companies purchased the output as it flowed into the grid. That market began, as all do, in a small way, with just 100MW or so in 2010. It has since grown.

In 2021, corporate procurement of clean energy topped 30GW. That’s about 10 per cent of the amount of renewable power generation capacity added last year; it’s also about the same as total global installations of clean power in 2008.

It is fair to describe the corporate renewable procurement phenomenon as primarily an Americas endeavour. Seventeen gigawatts of capacity announced last year came from the US, accounting

100 per cent