Ampion executive discusses market expansion and adapting to IRA guidance

Ampion Renewable Energy has fully subscribed more than 300 solar projects and they’re actively subscribing several dozen more, said Ampion’s CEO and founder Nate Owen in an interview with NPM.

Ampion partners with some of the biggest developers in the industry including NextEra, Catalyze, Agilitas Energy, Ameresco, Summit Ridge Energy, Renewable Properties, Consolidated Edison (ConEd), MN8 Energy, CVE, Generate, and Luminance by Brookfield Renewable, according to Owen.

During an interview at RE+ Northeast in Boston, Rick Layne, Ampion's Director of Sales Operation, added that their projects span across 12 states including Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Maryland, Illinois, California, Minnesota, Colorado, and Washington D.C. And they're in early stages of subscribing projects in Delaware, New Jersey, Virginia, and New Mexico.

The subscription and revenue management company handles everything from customer acquisition, bill credit management, revenue realization from the production site and many things in between.

While a large part of their business is finding new ways to attract subscribers to their platform, their priority is being adaptive for their clients.

“Our main loyalty and our primary responsibility are to the owners and operators of the sites to get them full and to keep them producing revenue at the highest level,” Layne said.

“Right now, I think there’s such velocity in the core part of the business which is developers identifying sites and then developing them,” Layne said, adding that the next two years “are going to be big” following the passage of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), despite the uncertainty surrounding much of its guidance.

The IRS’ most recent guidance surrounding the low-income adder to the investment tax credit has many unanswered questions, Layne said, but it was clear enough for the company to begin adapting.

“Ultimately, we’ve had to make judgment calls about what we think it means and so we’ve started acquiring LMI customers for some of our clients in anticipation of them being able to make applications to get that 20 percent (adder),” he said. “And we’ve had to make judgment calls about what qualifications, or what evidence we’re going to take to qualify a customer as LMI.”

Layne said they are able to identify effective proxies including individuals who receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicaid, or heat benefits.

Acquiring LMI customers is not a new concept, Layne said, as they’ve done so in states like New York where the Inclusive Community Solar Adder (ICSA) incentivizes LMI subscribers, however the IRA is taking it to another level.

Subscribing projects can be challenging for developers to do on their own because there are so many variables, Layne said. Variables such as managing subscribers coming and going, changes in their consumption, or monitoring credit values from different customer classes. Other variables include managing the production from the site and navigating regulations from state-to-state and utility-to-utility, Layne said.

“You have to take all of these things into account to have the right kinds of subscribers on a site and make sure you’re allocating as many of the credits as possible--100% of the credits every month,” he said.

Ampion subscribes residential customers and large enterprises and everything in between. Residential agreements tend to be shorter-term, around five years and enterprises start at about 10 years, Layne said. Both can terminate contracts but there could be consequences.

An advantage of hiring a company like Ampion is that they have experience in landing deals with large archor companies like TJX Companies, the parent company of TJ Max, Marshalls, HomeGoods, and other retail stores. At the end of fiscal 2022, the company had nearly 4,700 stores across nine countries, according to the TJX website.

“You may have a salesperson on staff, but they are not going to go out and land enterprise deals like TJX,” he said.

*This story was originally published exclusively for NPM subscribers last month.


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