Clean Energy Collective (CEC), the nation’s leading community solar solutions provider, has been named 2016 Solar Power Players “Innovative Partner of the Year” by the Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA). This prestigious award honors electric utility partners for creating the innovation and collaboration that drives smart solar growth among utilities and expands access to distributed energy technologies for their customers.
With the most widely adopted community shared solar model in the country, Clean Energy Collective has consistently demonstrated its intimate understanding of utility business processes, objectives, and the environment in which they operate. CEC has partnered with utilities for over seven years to deliver projects, services, and comprehensive software solutions that enable utilities of all types to offer a broad-reaching, cost-effective renewable energy program while preserving and strengthening the relationship with their customers.
CEC founder and CEO Paul Spencer expressed his gratitude for the recognition. “It is an honor to be recognized by SEPA for our collaboration with utilities. We started CEC based on the belief in the long-term power of utility-driven community solar and are proud to be working with some of the country’s largest IOU’s and most advanced co-ops and municipal utilities to deploy efficient, well-executed programs,” he said.
Developing community solar programs of all types in highly diverse environments has allowed CEC to provide unique capabilities to utilities as they navigate the regulatory, operational, and technical challenges inherent in community solar programs. CEC has built or has under development more than 100 RooflessSolar™ projects serving 12 states with 27 utility partners, including South Carolina Electric and Gas (SCE&G), CPS Energy, Avista Utilities, Fort Collins Utilities, and Xcel Energy.
In the past year alone CEC offered the first community solar program for the largest municipal utility in the country (CPS Energy), interconnected the first community solar array for a northwestern IOU (Avista), consulted for an investor-owned utility on how to meet a regulatory mandate to investigate community solar (Entergy), played a lead role in negotiations on two settlements with Xcel Energy improving Colorado’s pioneering legislated program, and provided its Community Solar Platform as the software foundation for two new IOU-led programs. CEC also just announced a new partnership with SCE&G to deliver the largest utility-driven community solar program in South Carolina and one of the largest in the country, which CEC will develop, build, own, and maintain.
“Community solar programs are increasingly recognized as a critical and extremely effective strategy for utilities to meet their customers’ demand for clean energy while also gaining experience with solar,” said Julia Hamm, SEPA president and CEO. “What we see with Clean Energy Collective, and our other category winners, is the competitive economics of solar driving a new willingness among utilities and their solar industry partners to collaborate on well-designed, customized solutions for putting more solar on the grid.”
Clean Energy Collective, along with winners in four other categories, will be honored at an awards luncheon on Tuesday, Sept. 13 at Solar Power International (SPI) in Las Vegas.
News item from Clean Energy Collective