As part of a partnership with Google that began in November to help the company reach its clean energy goals, AES has released a massive request for proposals (RFP) seeking to purchase up to 1 GW of energy, environmental attributes, ancillary services, and capacity from new renewable energy projects.
While this is a huge amount of capacity to be procuring at once, it’s well in-line with Google’s purchase history, as the company has already contracted more than 5.5 GW of renewables.
In this sense, ‘”new” means any project with commercial operation dates between January 1, 2020 and December 31, 2023, and all projects must be in the PJM interconnection grid. Eligible projects include new solar, new DC coupled solar + storage, new/repowered wind, both on and offshore and other new carbon free energy sources, excluding standalone storage projects.
AES will be considering projects between 20 MW and 800 MW in size, however if any developer wants to sell AES a portfolio of projects, they will have to do so under a single contract and price. Additionally, AES will only consider projects where the company would be purchasing a share of the generation if AES share is separately metered and can be independently settled.
AES also asks that developers provide contract pricing for the projects under an 8-, 10- or 12-year term, with preference being given to 8-year and 10-year terms. Similarly, preference will be given to projects with earlier commercial operation dates. As for generation resources, AES doesn’t outline preferences to one type of generation over the others and also doesn’t seem to prioritize solar projects that co-locate storage over those without storage.
Any developer interested in submitting proposals for this RFP must send an expression of interest to AES by June 26th, alongside a statement of qualifications and a completed copy of a non-disclosure agreement. From there, interested developers should submit any RFP-related questions to AES by July 1. Questions will be answered by July 8 and submissions are due by July 22. After all proposals have been reviewed, AES will award final projects selections on October 5th, though this is subject to change.
Expression of interest submission and all RFP-related documents can be found on AES’ RFP page.
