People in orange uniforms and safety helmets walk in between rows of solar panels on a solar panel farm.

Taking an Owner’s Perspective on Early- and Mid-Stage Utility-Scale Solar and Battery Energy Storage Development Projects at Redeux Energy

By Noah Eckert, Vice President, Development, Redeux Energy

Noah Eckert is a renewable energy executive who has spent the last 17+ years developing and commercializing distributed and utility scale solar and storage projects, totaling nearly $2bn in asset value.      

When considering projects for utility-scale solar and battery energy storage, Redeux Energy takes an Owner’s mindset on early- and mid-stage development. From identifying potential opportunities, through land acquisition, engineering and development, to marketing our projects for sale,  Redeux evaluates projects rigorously as we work to develop over 5GW of high-quality utility-scale solar and storage each year. 

Our experienced team of developers brings a broad and diverse skillset to the table. Coming from some of the largest and most successful IPP’s, storage manufacturers, pure-play and nested development shops, and regulated utilities and transmission organizations, our team has developed, financed, and commercialized projects in nearly every energy market in the United States. This is crucial as Redeux’s projects span a broad market footprint comprised of five energy markets over 15 states. By balancing an owner’s mindset with early-stage creativity and risk-taking, we create exceptional value for our partners and investors, while delivering quality projects that benefit the climate and local communities. 

Redeux’s Development Process 

Redeux’s platform to develop over 5GW annually is built on a thorough examination of market fundamentals of supply and demand, grounded with continuous commercial analyses on the most effective and accretive ways to deliver clean electricity to market. We utilize top-tier market tools integrated into our own software platform, ensuring we are informed by the most current market insights and innovation.   

After identifying opportunities, our developers work hand in hand with the land, engineering, and finance teams to help secure real estate rights, while optimizing real estate, engineering and financial considerations to create the greatest long-term value proposition for each project. As a customer-focused organization, we emphasize relationship development and management at all project levels.  We prioritize establishing long-term relationships with the landowners and local communities who are stakeholders in our projects, as well as elected officials charged with ensuring the public welfare, grid operators tasked with running safe and efficient markets, and ultimately the long-term project owners who deliver clean energy to government, industry and consumers. 

As projects mature, we work closely with our corporate development and sales team to ensure we are bringing the right projects at the right level of maturity to market at the right time.  Always driven by a commercial focus, our development process includes feedback loops at every step of the way to ensure our early stage targeting yields high quality assets that utilities, IPP’s and other energy buyers’ demand. 

Consistency Throughout the Process 

Long-term thinking is baked into each stage and decision we make, ensuring cross-functional analysis and risk management. Further, flexibility is at the heart of our process to ensure we can adapt to market dynamics and focus on the right problems we need to solve.   

We pride ourselves on developing meaningful and sustainable relationships with all stakeholders at the outset, giving us the highest probability of delivering economically-viable projects that are profitable, competitive in the energy market, profitable for the long-term asset owners, and beneficial for the local community for decades to come.  

In-House Expertise 

As an early- and mid-stage, pure-play developer, we have invested in internal capabilities that rival those of much larger organizations. We not only save on third party development expenses, we bring expertise in-house to eliminate scope gaps with vendors that can occur due to miscommunication, enabling our ability to iterate design and analysis efforts at minimal incremental cost. Further, this in-house expertise has an internal network effect, amplifying our ability to generate quality projects at a high volume, with more control over the entire process.  

While a highly-structured process may sound unusual to those familiar with utility-scale solar and battery energy storage development, this structure actually creates degrees of freedom that empower creativity and quality-focused thinking to unlock project and enterprise value while yielding better results.  

At Redeux, we have connectivity from ideation all the way to sale, which allows us to not only make the appropriate decisions for our current projects, but to incorporate feedback and learnings into future projects as well. Given the complexity of renewable projects, developers often times may solve one problem only to create more down the road.  At Redeux we are continuously learning from our mistakes and our successes, incorporating them into our processes and systems to make them better overall.  

Powered by world-class people, with leaders who bring the capabilities and experience from diverse backgrounds, Redeux Energy provides consistency and quality across all of its projects. We are committed to providing high-quality assets to our partners, in an effort to create success for all our stakeholders.   

If you’re interested in learning more about the utility-scale solar and batter energy storage development projects we’ve taken on at Redeux, we’d love for you to talk with our team. Connect with us to learn more.