EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy visits Regional Renewable Energy Procurement Project

Initially published on Greentech Media:

Although government agencies have collaborated on the procurement of goods to leverage economies of scale in the past, that type of purchase process has never been applied to energy services, said Caroline Judy, acting director of the Alameda County GSA, the lead agency in R-REP (Regional Renewable Energy Procurement Project), a syndicate of governmental agencies across four counties and 19 agencies in the East Bay and Silicon Valley regions of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Led by Alameda County, with help from Joint Venture Silicon Valley and Optony, a solar consultancy, R-REP put together a bid package for renewable power that provides lower prices than the individual parties could have obtained.

Judy said, “We have pricing at utility scale,” claiming PPA prices of 8 cents to 9 cents per kilowatt-hour on the aggregate projects, which is “15 percent to 47 percent below equivalent prior procurements.”

There are 186 regional government facilities getting distributed PV installed on the ground, rooftops, and on parking structures for a total of 31 megawatts of solar power. The projects range from 15-kilowatt fire station rooftops, to 230-kilowatt carport installations at libraries and police stations, to a 6.6-megawatt project on the West Winton Landfill in Hayward, the largest project in the R-REP portfolio.

Read more at: http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Local-Governments-Win-9-Cent-per-Kilowatt-Hour-Solar-With-Collaborative-Pro