BOSTON, Dec. 06, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, Sustainability Roundtable, Inc.'s (SR Inc) Net Zero Consortium for Buyers (NZCB) announced the achievement of its goal to enable NZCB Members to cause 1 Gigawatt (GW) of new renewable energy by 2025. In accomplishing this goal, NZCB Member enterprises have made SR Inc’s NZCB the leading platform for aggregated procurement of utility-scale clean energy in North America and Europe. SR Inc’s Gigawatt milestone follows news of its official transition to a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), reifying its commitment to higher standards of purpose, accountability, and transparency.

The NZCB is a confidential buyers’ community for Advanced Market Commitments (AMCs) to democratize global utility-scale clean energy and decarbonization. Its climate finance mechanism, “VPPA 2.0,” optimizes the virtual power purchase agreement (VPPA) transaction process and structure by centering buyer-directed, aggregated procurements through reverse auctions. This approach creates a risk-managed, auditable procurement process based on AMCs to procure purchaser-caused utility-scale clean energy.

The NZCB’s VPPA 2.0 approach addresses a critical issue in the increasingly confused global Energy Attribute Certificate (EAC) market: purchaser causation. By procuring exclusively purchaser-caused EACs (PC EACs), its reverse auctions yield contracts that corporate buyers can crucially and unassailably claim actually cause new renewable energy projects. VPPA 2.0 provides corporate sustainability teams with universally recognized, gold-standard solutions for Scope 2 emissions mitigation and 100% renewable electricity. By opening its buyer-directed reverse auctions to the general market in 2025, the NZCB will enable even more enterprises to set and achieve emission reduction goals without the reputational risk or volatile costs of unbundled RECs.

“We are incredibly proud to have achieved the Gigawatt goal, showing firsthand how impactful the VPPA 2.0 approach can be. To reach this goal, the NZCB team assisted over 30 world-leading enterprises in seven buyer-directed aggregated procurement reverse auctions for VPPA2.0,” said Jim Boyle, CEO of SR Inc. “The result is over 1.5 billion dollars to finance new renewable energy projects in North America and Europe – a figure that pales in comparison to what the NZCB's exponential growth can and will cause.”

The aggregated procurements facilitated by SR Inc’s NZCB team include new capacity generation at the Mesquite Star wind farm, the Azure Sky wind project, the Liberty Solar project and the Millers Branch Solar Facility in Texas, the Prairie Solar project in Illinois, and the Serbal solar project in Europe. The emphasis on the ERCOT and MISO regions enables new projects to come online to support grid resilience and energy independence in both areas. Participating corporate buyers have included Biogen, Wayfair, Synopsys, Uber, and many more.

With its initial 1 GW goal achieved, the NZCB now focuses on its new target: 10 GW of VPPA 2.0 AMCs for new renewable energy through 2030. The NZCB has already begun organizing the world’s high-credit buyers of off-site, utility-scale renewable energy for the “Next Gigawatt” of AMCs, which it hopes to achieve by the Summit for Sustainable Business IX in March 2026. This timetable aligns with the call by COP 28’s UAE Consensus to triple global new renewable energy deployment by 2030 – a climate imperative that requires business model innovations such as VPPA 2.0 to achieve the needed scale of clean energy transactions.

To learn more about SR Inc’s VPPA 2.0 approach to democratizing utility-scale renewable energy, please visit www.sustainround.com

Sustainability Roundtable, Inc. (SR Inc):
Trusted by scores of the world’s leading companies, SR Inc's Sustainable Business & Enterprise Roundtable (SBER) provides strategic advisory and support in enterprise decarbonization. SR Inc's Net Zero Consortium for Buyers (NZCB) is a confidential buyers' community committed to creating corporate buyer-favorable renewable energy transactions that enable participating enterprises to chart a profitable path to Net Zero emissions globally.

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