A top 3 global Independent Power Producer (IPP) scaled its greenfield New Development efforts by closing a successful lease in record time on View’s Develop Marketplace. Together with HST and its digital solutions, the IPP is able to move forward on development on projects that are notably de-risked and likely to get to completion.
To navigate the complexities of today’s IRA-driven development landscape, the IPP turned to HST to find lease opportunities that would meet its ambitious clean energy goal of adding 20 GW of solar by 2025. This goal has led to several challenges:
- Growing the pipeline quickly with quality projects while handling interconnection delays
- Handling limited budgets to hire new greenfield employees for greenfield acquisition
- Dynamic financing conditions with a higher interest rate environment
The Partnership: HST and the IPP’s Success Story
In May 2023, the IPP officially joined the View Develop Marketplace. Over the first six months, the IPP explored more than 2 GW of pre-qualified land listings on the platform, showcasing healthy offtake demand and ready-to-contract landowners. The marketplace employs algorithms to assess offtake and development feasibility for listings. By reviewing outputs from View’s Analyze offering, the IPP could evaluate various site area and landowner scenarios, ensuring the project maximized its commercial potential in the context of interconnection, lease rate, and offtake.
Their existing development team was able to address their fast paced development challenges by using the marketplace. They could apply their legal and their interconnection strategy to the development process while having a fast, paid-on-success pathway to successful site control.
Within 4 months, their team had coordinated and executed so well with landowners and other community stakeholders that they had closed initial site control on the first 1000+ acres.
How did they accelerate so fast? The IPP built off of the pre-vetted landowner engagement and land pre-qualification that the listings included, and added its own well-polished landowner engagement strategy to swiftly enter and close negotiations for a successful site control agreement process.
The landowners commented, “The technology gave us a common framework to speak to …[the IPP]… we listed our land on the View Develop Marketplace because of the trust we had in HST’s technology and team. The HST team quickly transferred the trusted relationship we built with them to…[the IPP]…. We could not be happier with the experience of meeting a long-term partner through HST’s technology and team.”
– Martin Halbur
The Outcome: A 1000+ acre, 150+ MW project is Successfully in Progress
Accelerate Greenfield by adding a real 1000+ acre, 150+ MW project to their pipeline within 8 weeks.
Ensure Derisking by closing site control where PPA offtake was pre-vetted. The less risk the more likely the project makes impact on the grid, with the potential to generate 0.27% of Iowa’s energy needs.
Operationalize Digital Development by continuing to engage landowners and evaluate new listings with additional projects representing 1GW of new solar. The IPP has a forward thinking approach that makes data-continuity and process efficiency top of mind to advance faster development.
For inquiries and further information, please contact HST at sales@hstpowers.com.