(Credit: Pixabay)LevelTen Energy said it has a new approach to clean energy procurement that cuts down timelines of power purchase agreements from three months to 12 months.
The new accelerated process, dubbed LEAP, enables energy buyers and their advisors to use the LevelTen platform to issue a request for proposal (RFP) with a standardized power purchase agreement (PPA). The process aims to reflect market conditions and include contract terms balanced for both parties in order to streamline the negotiation process. Clean energy project developers can then respond with price offers and project details, and choose certain “seller elections” to customize the PPA in the platform.
By bringing both the RFP and PPA stages into one platform, the process is 80% faster than the typical procurement process, according to LevelTen. LevelTen Energy’s platform is the world's largest online hub for renewable energy buyers, sellers, advisors, asset owners, and financiers.
"We need to speed up investment in clean energy exponentially to achieve corporate sustainability goals and, more importantly, to make an impact on the climate crisis,” Jason Tundermann, chief operating officer of LevelTen Energy, said in a statement. “With LEAP, energy buyers and sellers of all kinds can skip protracted contract negotiations and sign PPAs faster to bring more clean energy to the grid.”
LevelTen collaborated with Google to create the LEAP process and launch the first LEAPs. The process stems from the experience of both companies facing lengthy PPA processes without standardization.
"From over a decade of experience contracting PPAs, we learned that the process needed to be more efficient — not only to help us reach our own 24/7 carbon-free ambitions, but in order to transition our electricity grids in time to keep the planet under 1.5 degrees Celcius of warming," Amanda Peterson Corio, global head of data center energy at Google, said in a statement. "We joined forces with LevelTen to design an entirely new process, and the result has already enabled us to execute PPAs within weeks, compared to the traditional period of 12 months or even more. This approach builds a better system for clean energy buyers and sellers. LevelTen's announcement making LEAP available to the market opens the doors for more organizations to join the journey to a carbon-free grid."
The news comes a few months after LevelTen announced it launched a platform to expedite the process of contracting PPAs through an auction system, called PPA Auctions. Last year, the company also introduced LevelTen MarketPulse, a software designed to provide up-to-date PPA data and analytics to help businesses make better-informed market decisions in North America and Europe and provide transparency into the PPA market.
