Large energy users with renewable energy targets—like cities and corporations—face technical, policy, and market barriers when procuring renewables for their own operations and when attempting to expand access to renewables for other energy users. Municipal-corporate collaborations can remove these barriers and advance renewable electricity generation and use across the United States. Amplifying, enhancing, and scaling these efforts can help accelerate the clean energy transition.

To date, municipal and corporate renewable energy buyers have partnered on education and outreach efforts, joint procurement of renewable electricity, collaborative engagement to remove market barriers, and equitable deployment of renewables within communities. These collaborations demonstrate civic and climate leadership and yield a variety of benefits, including increased economies of scale, reduced costs and material risk, positive publicity, equitable communitywide access to renewables, and more rapid progress toward meeting individual and shared climate and energy targets.

Collaborations between municipal and corporate renewable energy buyers can add complexity to project implementation but can also be substantially more impactful than one entity working alone, for example, by increasing the size of or participation in a deal. For success, they require initial outreach and discussions; alignment on goals, roles, and responsibilities; adequate funding and staffing; and continued participation from all parties.