As corporate demand for clean power accelerates, energy producers are moving from passive suppliers to active architects of the energy transition.
Sonia Dunlop, CEO of the Global Solar Council, sets out why the shift to high-impact corporate sourcing is reshaping how solar and storage projects are financed, structured and delivered, and why the most important chapter is still ahead.
The corporate power purchase agreement (PPA) market has become a structural force reshaping how clean energy projects get built and financed. Between 2013 and 2020, 75% of global investment in renewables came from the private sector, with 20% driven by market-based corporate sourcing. At the centre of that shift is growing corporate demand for clean electricity that is available across more hours of the day. In other words, what corporate buyers increasingly need is not simply renewable volume, but reliable clean electricity delivered predictably over time.
For solar developers, the commercial logic of high-impact corporate sourcing starts with certainty. Without a long-term contract, producers sell to a wholesale market that moves unpredictably over the lifetime of an asset.
Moreover, the creditworthiness of large corporate buyers introduces a financing lever that the traditional utility model cannot match. In many markets, the credit rating of a major technology company substantially exceeds that of the local utility that would otherwise be purchasing the power, allowing developers to leverage that rating to access lower-cost finance. Increasingly, developers are structuring projects around corporate demand profiles, combining technologies to meet more granular clean energy requirements.
High-impact corporate sourcing demands more than variable renewable generation. The challenge is increasingly being addressed, and the primary reason is battery storage. Battery energy storage systems (BESS) have seen sharp cost declines over the past years, with average global prices in 2025 falling to one-third of levels seen in 2020 and global installations of storage capacity increasing more than 20-fold in the same period.
In practice, large developers are already bundling technologies together under hybrid offerings that can credibly guarantee clean power for every half hour across the year at a fixed price. Currently, 46 suppliers already offer hourly matching tariffs, covering around 73% of global electricity demand, which represents a fourfold increase in available tariffs between November 2024 and the same month in 2025.
Energy security adds another dimension to the case. A long-term solar PPA locks in electricity costs at a stable price over decades, shielding both companies and countries from the volatility of global energy markets. In 2024 alone, renewables avoided an estimated $467 billion in fossil fuel costs, demonstrating their strategic value for energy security and economic stability. The distributed nature of solar power builds a different kind of resilience too, one that centralised generation cannot replicate.
What remains is the work of removing the barriers that still hold the market back: the inflexibility of demand profiles and grid access constraints in many markets. Additionally, Sonia warns that the benefits of corporate-driven renewable build-out risk remaining concentrated in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) economies unless new markets are opened:
Through its ongoing regional engagement with the Asia Clean Energy Coalition and the Latin America Clean Energy Coalition, the Global Renewables Alliance and its six member associations, including the Global Solar Council, are working to expand access to corporate sourcing frameworks beyond traditional markets, supporting policy and market reforms, to ultimately ensure that the benefits of falling solar and storage costs translate into economic development, energy security and industrial growth.
