By: admin
WRI India and Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) through the Green Power Market Development Group (GPMDG) initiative attempted to aggregate energy demand from six corporate buyers in Bengaluru—Coca Cola, Infosys, IBM, Cognizant, Philips and Bangalore International Exhibition Center (BIEC).
The aim was to combine their RE procurement into one bid to achieve economies of scale and reduce transaction costs per project. This larger combined project size made this opportunity more attractive for project developers and financiers. Our hope was to demonstrate a new aggregated procurement model that could be replicated across India to accelerate the deployment of rooftop solar power. GPMDG called this aggregated procurement model as the CollabSolar project.
This working paper outlines the processes, barriers and key lessons learned from the CollabSolar project in Bengaluru (2014), which can help advance additional aggregation strategies going forward.
Corporate consumers are increasingly concerned about the carbon footprint of their businesses. Electricity consumption of commercial and industrial companies is largely sourced from fossil fuel-based generation and accounts for a significant portion of their Green House Gas (GHG) emissions. Hence procurement of renewable energy (RE) has become a central piece of companies’ corporate sustainability strategy, something that is also aided by the declining costs of RE. Among various forms of renewable energy in India, rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) technology can offer increasingly affordable, clean and reliable electricity at the site of consumption itself.
The scale of rooftop solar deployment can be limited by the amount of roof space at an individual site and various other competing uses the roof has. This may limit the individual project size at each site which could result in increased transaction costs for the vendors because of the time and resources they need to invest in exploiting each of them. However if this demand is aggregated, data collection process streamlined, and buyers coordinated in the timing of a purchase, the transaction costs can be reduced to help these projects move forward. To address these issues, WRI India and Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) through the Green Power Market Development Group (GPMDG) initiative attempted to aggregate energy demand from six corporate buyers in Bengaluru—Coca Cola, Infosys, IBM, Cognizant, Philips and Bangalore International Exhibition Center (BIEC). The aim was to combine their RE procurement into one bid to achieve economies of scale and reduce transaction costs per project. This larger combined project size made this opportunity more attractive for project developers and financiers. Our hope was to demonstrate a new aggregated procurement model that could be replicated across India to accelerate the deployment of rooftop solar power. GPMDG called this aggregated procurement model as the CollabSolar project.
This working paper outlines the processes, barriers and key lessons learned from the CollabSolar project in Bengaluru (2014), which can help advance additional aggregation strategies going forward.
The lessons and experience gained from this pilot are as follows:
This experience will inform the design of the next iteration of demand aggregation projects to be handled by GPMDG across industrial or business parks in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and other states. This guide can also serve as a reference for others working on demand aggregation models.