Special Edition Blog from Green Strategies Senior Advisor, Miranda Ballentine
After a slow year in 2023, you might have wondered if corporates were backtracking on their clean energy ambitions. Well, 2024 marks ten years since the Clean Energy Buyers Alliance (CEBA) started counting carbon-free energy (CFE) deals announced by voluntary energy buyers, and let’s just say…the market is hot!
In 2024, companies announced more clean energy deals than ever; they surpassed a huge milestone; and they broke records with new deal structures and power technologies.
Just the facts, Ma’am. CEBA’s 2024 Deal Tracker, its annual overview of market trends in voluntary clean energy procurement, marks several exciting developments. 235 clean energy customers have made clean energy deals since 2014, with 49 unique customers in 2024. Voluntary clean energy deals announced by corporates surpassed 100 GW, cumulative, since 2014. That’s equivalent to 41% of all clean energy added to the grid since 2024. Go corporate buyers! 21.7 GW were announced in 2024, making 2024 the highest single year to date.
Think all of that’s impressive? Let’s take a look back to what we aspired for a decade ago when a small, loose-knit community came together to set mutual ambitions in 2014. Let’s also look at where we were in 2019, an important year both because it was CEBA’s first official year as a new organization, and because 2019 marked the beginning of many of the market trends that are coming to life today.
Looking back 5 and 10 years. CEBA’s original founding goal set in 2014 was 60 GW by 2025, and we all thought 60 GW was going to be extraordinarily hard to hit (remember, in 2014, we only had three buyers in the market, with just 1.2 GW procured!). Fast forward five years to the 2019 CEBA (then REBA) Spring Member Summit in Orlando (hosted by Disney, oh that one was FUN!), the 2018 Deal Tracker calculated just over 16 GW of clean energy deals had been announced by 70 voluntary buyers since 2014
Mind-bogglingly, the original 60 GW goal was achieved in 2022—three years early. Thus, 2024’s 100 GW announcement is a huge milestone—67% more than what was originally thought possible by this time, thanks to voluntary procurement by 235 motivated companies.
Technologies of choice. You might now be familiar with large solar arrays dotting buildings and landscapes, but from 2014 to 2018, wind power was still much more popular than solar, accounting for 55% of renewables deals announced in 2018. The market for large, utility scale solar projects was just not there…yet. Then, in 2019, it flipped. Large developers previously focused mostly on wind began offering low-cost solar options from well-known developers. Prices for solar technologies plummeted, putting it on par with wind. (Now, wind and solar are nearly tied for lowest levelized cost of energy out of all sources in the country, according to Lazard). In 2019, solar represented nearly 60% of contracted capacity. Since then, solar has remained the most popular renewable technology by far – in CEBA’s 2024 deal tracker, we see that solar represented over 73% of contracted clean energy. The inertia behind solar is strong, even as other decarbonization technologies are added to the mix. We don’t expect this to change any time soon.
A shift in the ends and the means. Also at the 2019 CEBA Summit, a live poll showed that over a third of CEBA members expected focus to shift increasingly towards all forms of carbon-free energy that can generate power around the clock, any time we need it. Renewables were beginning to become a means to a carbon-free end. This year, investments in storage, geothermal, and new nuclear in 2024 prove that this trend is kicking off. 2018 was the first year in which battery storage was deployed. This year, we see battery storage is one of the top three most common technologies – 1.7 GW of battery storage was added by voluntary buyers in 2024.
Nuclear power was added to the mix of announcements for the first time in 2024 – 1.5 GW were announced. Typically, large tech companies have been the leaders supporting this type of around-the-clock clean energy, but this year we were excited to see Brookfield Properties announcing that their DC area office portfolio is now powered by nuclear.
In addition, Google, and Meta (a Green Strategies’ client) will each procure more than 100 MW of geothermal, another carbon-free resource.
If 2019 was the beginning of voluntary procurement recognizing that renewables are one of multiple tools to decarbonize the grid, 2024 may go down as the year in which all means towards grid decarbonization were truly ushered in.
Other things I noticed: Green Strategies’ clients like Meta and Walmart (full disclosure, I used to work for Walmart!) were again top buyers in 2024. Meta, in fact, has been a top-two buyer for four years in a row (Meta dropped to #5 in 2020, but was the top buyer from 2017-2019 as well). Walmart, in addition, continues to support new deal structures like inventive community solar projects. New deal structures across the market are growing in popularity as well. Out of 2.5 GW procured using tax equity investments since 2014, 1.1 GW was procured in 2024 alone.
So, another monumental year for clean energy. After a slowdown last year, it looks like corporates are doubling down on deals, and that trends first anticipated over 5 years ago are here to stay. Green Strategies looks forward to more analysis of the 2024 Deal Tracker from the CEBA team, and to celebrating these milestones with you at CEBA’s 2025 Summit this spring in Minneapolis. Thanks for walking down memory lane with me – let’s keep this positive momentum going.
