Coffee, cloud and clean energy: LevelTen unites Starbucks and Workday for Texas solar deal

Starbucks and software company Workday are joining up to support the construction of a 350 megawatt solar power installation in Central Texas. The clean energy agreement was facilitated by Seattle startup LevelTen Energy and will count towards the two companies’ climate efforts.

The deal also includes financing for a program called Renewable Agriculture Inclusion for Underrepresented People (RAIN-UP), which benefits socially disadvantaged farmers, ranchers and landowners and works to connect them with potentially lucrative renewable energy projects.

The announcement comes at a time when the Trump administration is scrapping funding for solar and wind energy and discouraging programs addressing inclusion.

Erik Hansen, chief sustainability officer at Workday, said a project like this aligns with the company’s values and its customers’ expectations.

“We have over 11,000 customers globally, and they are organizations that themselves have climate goals, sustainability goals,” Hansen told GeekWire. “They’re expecting us, as a large part of their value chain, to really be taking action around climate.”

Workday, a finance and HR platform for businesses, has been paying for clean energy since 2008. “We’re not backing down,” Hansen said. “We’ve had these commitments for a number of years.”

The solar project in Concho County, Texas, is being developed by High Road Clean Energy and the project owner is Energy Innovation Partners.

LevelTen orchestrated a power purchase agreement or PPA that will last 15 years, and includes Starbucks, Workday and other participants who have vowed to buy energy from the solar installation. PPAs are seen as an effective tool for financing new clean energy deployments by getting guaranteed customers of the electricity.

“Working with the LevelTen team allowed us to identify and vet projects more effectively than we could do alone. Without LevelTen, we wouldn’t have found this project,” said John Stewart, Starbucks’ program manager for Clean Energy and Clean Technologies, in a statement.

Starbucks also has a “Greener Stores” program that has certified 9,000 locations as meeting sustainability benchmarks, with plans to add 1,000 more to the effort by the end of the year.

While some federal leaders are cooling on clean energy, Rob Collier, LevelTen’s senior vice president of marketplaces, said demand for the projects remains high.

“Demand is booming right now for energy, for electricity, for power, particularly clean electrons,” Collier told GeekWire. “And that’s driven by a number of pretty strong macroeconomic forcing functions: the need for data centers, and the increased demand due to AI.”

But that’s not the entire story for the renewable energy marketplace.

The demand is coming from “experienced buyers,” Collier said, such as Starbucks and Workday, as opposed to attracting new PPA customers. And the supply side is getting more difficult, with ongoing challenges with permitting and electrical grid connections, as well as persistent uncertainty around policy and tariffs making it hard to plan and deploy the infrastructure.

Regardless, this and other deals are in the works. And Hansen and Collier said they hoped agreements like this one that support renewable energy, as well as local community and economic interests, can become more widely adopted.

“This is a model of what a clean energy deal could look like, that thinks beyond volume,” Hansen said. “So not just environmental impact, [but] economic impact, workforce development, educational impact. All of that’s wrapped up in what you think of as sustainability.”