People and Partnerships

Many conversations surrounding renewable energy developments tend toward the technical, whether they’re about the underlying technologies governing PV modules, energy storage, or the innovative financial strategies being used to source capital. 

Recently, following my return from a series of meetings with the individuals who own a tract of land that will serve as the central location for an upcoming Candela utility-scale solar project, I was reminded that there’s another key component to any successful project: the local people we work with, from the very beginning, that make it possible.

It may be obvious, but every project needs a physical location. In the case of solar, there are a significant number of informing characteristics that determine the suitability and potential for a given location. Candela’s specific requirements are proprietary, but as you can imagine they include solar insolation, proximity to the grid, evaluating any constraints, environmental impacts, and of course, the cost.

Once we’ve performed our analysis, however, we’ll put down our pencils, get on a plane, and go and directly meet the property owners themselves. This is because Candela strongly believes successful personal relationships with landowners are crucial to the ultimate success of our renewable energy projects.

The anchor tracts of land we focus on are reasonably large and tend to be in rural locations. Our anchor landowners, more often than not, are active and influential in their local communities and have developed reputations (in some cases, over generations) for being careful and judicious about the way they conduct business. 

The development cycle is itself a multi-year process from beginning to end, and so cooperation, communication and patience are all key ingredients for success. This is true not only between Candela and the landowner, but for the larger community as well. If we can’t develop and maintain a durable, productive relationship with one landowner, then how can we expect to build the necessary relationships with the community to support a complex project over a period of time measured in years?

Unsurprisingly, we believe that communication is at the core of these relationships. We make a point of meeting with our landowners directly, and making sure they understand where we are at each phase of a project’s development. As the development of green infrastructure intensifies, we expect more participants to enter the space, many of whom will have no specific intention of actually seeing a project through to completion (rather, they’ll look to collect options to develop land, and look to flip those options).

While we enjoy the strength of being backed by a large international energy company, Candela is an independent developer approaching its business one project - and therefore, one relationship - at a time. Our goal is to see every one of our projects through to completion, which means we are in this for the long haul. And, every one of our projects starts with, and hinges on, developing and maintaining a good relationship with our landowners and their communities, and we take these relationships seriously - these are people we consider to be members of the Candela team.

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