From pv magazine USA
Financial firm Wells Fargo is partnering with Ameresco to install 30 MW of new onsite solar arrays on nearly 100 of its retail and administrative offices in Arizona, California, Connecticut, Iowa, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Texas.
“There may be opportunities to do more. The cost of [solar] technology has been coming down, and panel efficiency has been going up,” said Curt Radkin, senior vice president in sustainable strategy for Wells Fargo’s corporate properties group. “The economics just make sense.”
For its first wave of projects, Wells Fargo selected states with relatively high power costs and/or favorable incentive programs for onsite solar, and locations where it has a lot of employees and customers. The bank’s new projects range from a 6 kW rooftop array on a branch in Connecticut to a 6.5 MW carport and rooftop system at the bank’s Chandler, Arizona, campus.
Other larger projects will include a 5.5 MW combination rooftop/ground mount system to serve an administrative property in San Antonio, Texas, and a nearly 2 MW ground mount system next to a Wells Fargo campus in Des Moines, Iowa.
With the new strategy, RECs, which the bank has been using to meet its electricity needs since 2017, will make up a smaller part of its renewable energy play; installing behind-the-meter solar offers the opportunity to have a greater impact.
When the first wave of projects are completed next year, Wells Fargo is expected to overtake Bank of America as the leading U.S. financial services company helping to support new renewable generation capacity via its operations.
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