This year’s award winners — nominated by and voted on by energy industry stakeholders, including the team of analysts at GTM Research — represents an even broader set of participants in this energy revolution. First, the awards were expanded to accept submissions from companies or projects based outside the U.S., as well as individual commercial, industry or public energy consumers who have deployed distributed energy solutions on-site.
Second, our 2017 Grid Edge Awards include hard data from projects that are putting each winning company or project’s innovations to the test — a nod to the real-world growth we’ve seen emerge since we started tracking the field four years ago.
Edison Energy/PowerBloks PPA
Today’s market for corporate renewable power purchase agreements is dominated by large companies serving as “offtakers,” or purchasers of large blocks of power. Edison Energy wants to open the market to smaller companies, and its PowerBloks power-purchase agreements (PPAs) are the solution.
Developed by the Altenex unit of Edison Energy, which has helped clients execute more than 1.4 gigawatts of renewable energy transactions in the U.S. and Mexico, PowerBloks feature 10-year terms and 10-megawatt tranches of off-take sourced from new-build renewable energy projects, giving organizations with smaller energy loads access to the “financial, risk and sustainability benefits of new renewables.” Getting to commercialization was a significant challenge, but PowerBloks PPAs are now available from Edison Energy, and “the rollout to the market has just begun in earnest.”
