LevelTen Energy, for instance, has created a dynamic, two-sided market that aggregates PPA buyers and sellers, allowing them to connect and transact more efficiently than they’d likely be able to achieve on their own. One solution is to work with a third-party aggregator. Or, get helpĪnother barrier holding back smaller companies can be their lack of in-house expertise with long-term, bulk power purchasing arrangements. The structure also provides the developers guaranteed buyers for their projects, which helps to secure financing. In an aggregated deal, each buyer gets the advantage of economies of scale. Alone, Akamai could hope to cover only a fraction of these projects’ generation. The company is collaborating with three other companies to divide up the off-take that could involve several renewable energy projects. Research suggests Iowa, Illinois, New Jersey, California and Texas make it easiest for corporations to procure domestic renewable energy.Īkamai is in the process of securing virtual PPAs for several new projects, she said.
With this arrangement, Akamai assumes the market risk for the electricity, which reduces the risk for Infinity, according to Peill-Moelter. This electricity is then sold on the open market, although Akamai retains the renewable energy credits (RECs), because Akamai hosts its servers in third-party data centers and already pays the data center vendor for the electricity used. Under its contract with the project developer, Infinity Renewables, Akamai has committed to purchasing a certain percentage of the output of the wind farm, an "off-take," at a pre-determined price. The structure of Akamai’s deal, a virtual power purchase agreement, offers one way to resolve that challenge, said Nicola Peill-Moelter, Akamai’s senior director of environmental sustainability, in an emailed response to a request for comment. Or their power needs might be spread across more than one region, further diluting their purchasing influence. For one thing, they often do not need all the energy generated by large-scale renewable energy projects. Traditionally speaking, midsize companies such as Akamai have found the process of negotiating contracts for renewable energy daunting. Alphabet’s Google expects to be powered entirely by clean energy this year. Twenty-two Fortune 500 companies have committed to sourcing 100 percent of their electricity needs from renewables, including Walmart, Apple, General Motors and Amazon. The report found that 71 of Fortune 100 companies have set renewable energy or sustainability targets, up from 60 just two years ago. companies is significant and growing quickly, according to a December analysis by the Advanced Energy Economy (AEE), a clean energy trade group.
Once operational, energy from the farm will offset Akamai’s aggregate Texas data center operations, which account for about 7 percent of its global power load, according to a company press release. In early May, cloud services company Akamai Technologies announced a 20-year investment in an 80-megawatt wind energy farm slated to come online in 2018. Not only are these organizations meeting carbon-reduction commitments through these commitments, they may be saving money in the process. While major renewable power purchase contracts typically have been the province of corporate behemoths such as Google and Microsoft, smaller companies are beginning to get in the game in a more visible way.
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