Two of our team members leading the charge in the southeast, Cameron Bard, VP of Business Development, and Juliana Harless, Southeast Market Lead, were excited to attend the Southeast Renewable Energy Summit in Charlotte late November 2022.

Catching up with local partners and utilities, meeting new folks and talking through opportunities, and hearing from industry stakeholders on future market directions only heightened our excitement for the continued growth throughout the southeast region. Over 300 regulators, utility executives, renewable energy developers, financiers, and other active participants joined this remarkably insightful event.

Topics included:

What directions are increasingly sophisticated corporate buyers driving both energy policies and procurement strategies?- What roles will storage play in assuring reliability and resilience in a region troubled by increasingly violent storms and hurricanes?

How are increasing costs and inflationary pressures affecting developer strategies, the M&A market and project financing?- How MISO South and more generally transmission system access and development will affect opportunities across the region?

During the conference we heard from key state policymakers, including Mississippi Public Service Commissioner Brent Bailey, who spoke on wins that are stimulating new investments such as Mississippi’s new net metering policy, to hurdles the industry still may to face in their respective states. Several leading utility executives spoke on their plans to incorporate clean energy commitments into their IRPs, further proving southern state’s efforts to work alongside policymakers to shift to a friendlier market for clean energy.

Cameron was a panelist on a topic particularly close to home, ‘Platform Deals and the M&A Market in the Southeast.’ In the past few years renewable energy M&A has swung from the project level to the corporate level, posing a new discussion on the challenges and opportunities that come alongside market participants selling entire platforms. Cameron and colleagues from EOS Capital and Leyline Renewable Capital shared their thoughts on all facets that make these mergers successful, including both the people and the projects. “The Southeast is poised for continued clean energy growth and opportunities for greater project deployment, M&A activity, and new partnerships," Cam said.

"As we discussed on our panel at the conference, making predictions about what the future holds is hard. But what’s clear is the excitement and enthusiasm of industry leaders to launch new companies and diversify their technology offerings behind solar to include storage, mobility, and other solutions.

We’re thrilled to have launched Accel-Dev at a time when more and more of our peers are catching the entrepreneurial bug and looking for resources to help incubate their own clean energy startups and platforms. The Southeast is a natural home for innovation, creative problem solving, and near-term growth and we couldn’t be more excited for what’s in store across the region.

”It’s always a great to spend a few days with colleagues and partners that are focused on the southeast," Juliana said. When it comes to the southeast’s transition to a cleaner, more renewable future, the positivity and excitement surrounding the conference proved that one theme runs strong amongst us all – the southeast is only moving forward in the energy transition.”