Why is the traditional process for procuring a clean energy project so difficult?
The conventional approach to buying clean energy for commercial buildings is fragmented, time-consuming, and makes it hard to compare options — but the industry is evolving toward more standardized processes.
For most commercial building owners, procuring a renewable energy project through the traditional process is frustrating. A significant portion of a project's total cost — often cited as over 50% — goes to non-hardware soft costs: customer acquisition, permitting, interconnection, financing, and project management. Much of that cost traces back to an inefficient procurement process.
The traditional approach requires extensive manual research to understand your building's clean energy potential, followed by reaching out to multiple providers individually to get bids. Each provider has different data requirements, timelines, and proposal formats. The result is long email threads, proposals built on different assumptions, and financial models that are nearly impossible to compare side by side.
Common frustrations include: the time and expense of simply understanding whether clean energy makes financial sense for your buildings; difficulty finding and vetting qualified providers; proposals that use different assumptions, making comparison unreliable; and the reality that for most facilities and sustainability teams, this isn't their full-time job.
The industry is gradually moving toward more standardized procurement processes — digital platforms, standardized data collection, structured RFPs with uniform proposal templates, and tools that make it easier to compare bids on an apples-to-apples basis. If you're starting a procurement process, look for approaches that standardize the data providers receive and the format in which they respond. This single change dramatically improves the quality and comparability of the proposals you get back.