These companies are facing mounting pressure from investors to decarbonize – clean energy contracts serve as a way to diversify energy spend and reduce susceptibility to the tangible risks associated with climate change.”įigure 1 (above) shows that PPAs in the Americas region totalled an unprecedented 15.7GW last year. Kyle Harrison, a sustainability analyst at BNEF and the lead author of the report, commented: “The clean energy portfolios of some of the largest corporate buyers rival those of the world’s biggest utilities. Occidental Petroleum, Chevron and Energy Transfer Partners all signed solar contracts in 2019, following in the steps of ExxonMobil, who kicked off the trend by signing two PPAs totalling 575MW at the end of 2018. Though not as active as the technology sector, a growing number of oil and gas companies are signing clean energy deals. Facebook (1.1GW), Amazon (0.9GW) and Microsoft (0.8GW) were the next largest buyers globally in 2019. The company used a unique reverse auction process to sign these contracts, with developers taking part in a live, public bidding process. In September 2019, the tech giant announced contracts to purchase 1.9GW of clean energy in six countries – the largest single announcement ever by a corporation. Google signed contracts to purchase over 2.7GW of clean energy globally in 2019, more than any other corporation. Technology companies once again dominated clean energy procurement. These buyers are reshaping power markets and the business models of energy companies around the world.” That is bigger than the power generation fleets of markets like Vietnam and Poland. Jonas Rooze, lead sustainability analyst at BNEF, said: “Corporations have purchased over 50GW of clean energy since 2008. Put in context, the 2019 total was equivalent to more than 10% of all the renewable energy capacity added globally last year – and the projects involved are likely to cost between $20 billion and $30 billion to develop and build.

This was up from 13.6GW in 2018, and more than triple the activity seen in 2017. The majority of this purchasing occurred in the United States, but also underpinning the strong uptrend is a surge in corporate sustainability commitments around the world.īloombergNEF (BNEF) finds in its 1H 2020 Corporate Energy Market Outlook, published today, that some 19.5GW of clean energy contracts were signed by more than 100 corporations in 23 different countries in 2019.

New York, Janu– Corporations bought a record amount of clean energy through power purchase agreements, or PPAs, in 2019, up more than 40% from the previous year’s record.

Outlook 2019 purchase