Programs designed to leverage regional evaluation and purchasing of solar power across multiple organizations and sites for the maximum benefits to participants and industry.
Solar for Government and Commercial Organizations
Background (Courtesy of World Resources Institute Purchasing Power )
Solar photovoltaics (PV) is a commercially proven technology and, in markets with incentives, can compete with traditional fossil fuel-based power. Wider adoption and decreases in manufacturing costs are driving down the cost of solar electricity. As the industry grows and matures, it will optimize and standardize its practices to further reduce costs and make solar energy accessible to a mainstream market. The crucial role of policy in accelerating this industry growth and maturation cannot be understated. Today, however, several barriers remain to bringing solar PV to scale:
- Transaction costs can be high. Because the industry is fragmented and installation processes are not standardized around the country, each developer has different procedures and negotiated contracts. Allocating internal staff resources to research solar power and to negotiate fair contracts for each potential site can be expensive.
- Learning takes time and effort. Potential buyers have to learn on their own about the solar market, financing, and technology, while building internal consensus for moving forward.
- Demand is fragmented with many individual sites being developed opportunistically. The current patchwork approach of designing, permitting, contracting, and installing systems for one facility at a time is inefficient.
These barriers help explain the slow pace of solar PV adoption among commercial and government consumers. However, collaborative purchasing can help overcome these barriers and scale up solar PV deployment. By organizing interested consumers (and their potential installation sites) into groups, collaborative purchasing can reduce transaction costs, educate potential buyers, and aggregate demand so that solar panels can be installed at lower-than-average costs.
http://www.wri.org/publication/purchasing-power