Sustainability Roundtable, Inc. (SR Inc) has announced that its Net Zero Consortium for Buyers (NZCB) has successfully achieved its goal of enabling 1 Gigawatt (GW) of new renewable energy by 2025. This accomplishment positions the NZCB as the leading platform for aggregated procurement of utility-scale clean energy in North America and Europe. The milestone follows SR Inc’s transition to a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), reaffirming its commitment to higher standards of purpose, accountability, and transparency.
The Role of the Net Zero Consortium for Buyers
The NZCB functions as a confidential buyers’ community focused on Advanced Market Commitments (AMCs) to democratize utility-scale clean energy and decarbonization. Its innovative climate finance mechanism, known as “VPPA 2.0,” optimizes the virtual power purchase agreement (VPPA) process by centering buyer-directed, aggregated procurements through reverse auctions. This method creates a risk-managed and auditable procurement process based on AMCs, ensuring that corporate buyers can claim they have directly caused new renewable energy projects.
Addressing Market Challenges
The NZCB’s VPPA 2.0 approach tackles a significant issue in the global Energy Attribute Certificate (EAC) market: purchaser causation. By exclusively procuring purchaser-caused EACs (PC EACs), the reverse auctions yield contracts that corporate buyers can confidently claim are linked to new renewable energy projects. VPPA 2.0 provides corporate sustainability teams with gold-standard solutions for Scope 2 emissions mitigation and 100% renewable electricity.
Future Plans and Growth Targets
With plans to open its buyer-directed reverse auctions to the general market in 2025, the NZCB aims to help more enterprises set and achieve emission reduction goals without the reputational risks associated with unbundled renewable energy certificates (RECs).
“We are incredibly proud to have achieved the Gigawatt goal, showing firsthand how impactful the VPPA 2.0 approach can be,” stated Jim Boyle, CEO of SR Inc. “The NZCB team assisted over 30 leading enterprises in seven aggregated procurement reverse auctions for VPPA 2.0, resulting in over $1.5 billion financing for new renewable energy projects in North America and Europe.”
Notable Projects and Corporate Participation
The aggregated procurements facilitated by SR Inc’s NZCB include new capacity generation at several projects, such as the Mesquite Star wind farm, Azure Sky wind project, Liberty Solar project, and the Millers Branch Solar Facility in Texas. Other projects include the Prairie Solar project in Illinois and the Serbal solar project in Europe. This emphasis on the ERCOT and MISO regions supports grid resilience and energy independence.
Participating corporate buyers include notable names such as Biogen, Wayfair, Synopsys, and Uber, among others.
Setting New Targets
With the initial 1 GW goal achieved, the NZCB is now targeting 10 GW of VPPA 2.0 AMCs for new renewable energy through 2030. The consortium has already begun organizing high-credit buyers of off-site, utility-scale renewable energy for the “Next Gigawatt” of AMCs, which it aims to achieve by the Summit for Sustainable Business IX in March 2026. This timeline aligns with the COP 28’s UAE Consensus, which calls for tripling global new renewable energy deployment by 2030—a climate imperative that necessitates business model innovations like VPPA 2.0 to achieve the required scale of clean energy transactions.
Sources
- Sustainability Roundtable – Net Zero Consortium for Buyers
- VPPA 2.0 Overview – Sustainability Strategies
- COP 28 UAE Consensus – Climate Goals
