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Developing Utility Scale Renewable Energy and Energy Storage Partnerships
February 17, 2021
| Scott Donachie

Kelly Sarber, CEO, Strategic Management Group joins CZW RoundTable to discuss the fast-growing segment of energy storage and Public Private Partnerships key in generating revenues and green energy value, and provides a guidebook to attracting strong partners.

For the energy market, corporations, municipalities and sanitation districts/WWTP have un-levered property that can generate income streams. Federal stimulus funds will look for shovel ready projects that are also aiding in combating climate change and creating renewable energy/storage projects in key congested locations.

Private market participants interested in partnering to co-locate projects to drive infrastructure investment for utility scale energy storage projects.

Kelly Sarber, CEO, Strategic Management Group

 “I’m soliciting strategic partnerships with well, located industrial sites for energy storage and entities, and seeking municipalities wastewater treatment plants, waste facilities, large corporate campuses near urban electric congestion zones.”

Kelly Sarber

Kelly discussed projects in multiple states are already underway in a recent article: Landfills emerge as promising battery storage sites to back up renewable energy, and how siting ESS and building battery storage at existing landfills and wastewater treatment facilities sites, where there is typically ample empty space, and batteries are presenting a new revenue stream for closed landfills.

Kelly said, “There is an opportunity to create two revenue streams instead of just one” at sites that use landfill gas to generate electricity and that “the batteries can use the interconnection to the electric grid, freeing up the gas to be used for other purposes like being sold as vehicle fuel.”

Interested parties in these projects have been “driven by state-level by both state-level policies that create a market for storage capacity,” and “by clean energy goals at the municipal level.” Battery storage lets cities take credit for more clean energy that offsets their emissions, and can cut the costs of operating landfills that serve those cities, or turn a closed landfill from a liability to an asset.

Kelly is a proven renewable energy developer, most recent in one of the “Biggest Energy Storage System in NYS Is Major Step Toward Clean Energy Goals,” a recent New York City 174PG project: “Con Edison & 174 Power Global Bringing Large Battery Project to Queens.”

About
Kelly Sarber is CEO/President of Strategic Management Group. Current clients include EnCap Energy Transition, Hanwha 174 Power Global, Berkshire Hathaway Renewables and Southern California Edison. She is an expert developing renewable energy, energy storage and waste related environmental projects through the value chain – from sourcing greenfield sites thru permitting, financing and operations. From the naions’ largest solar project (3.2GW) tying into Starwood Energy’s new 500kv line, The Ten West Link, and soon to be announced Energy Storage Projects, Sarber has developed over $5 Billion in asset value.
Kelly Sarbor
Interested in the nascent industries of solar panel recycling and lith Ion battery recovery/recycling, she is incubating companies in niche waste and wastewater RNG sectors. Her environmental consulting company has a proven reputation in innovative business development advantages driving revenue growth and deal origination.  
Sarber specialized career has created an unparalleled network of private companies and public agencies that value her innovative public private approaches that compliments private companies and governmental entity’s goals. She has generated tens of millions of dollars at a landfill partnership with an Arizona County and Republic Waste Systems and recently completed another partnering approach that will generate similar returns for a large CA Sanitation District. 

Before pivoting to renewables in 2008, Sarber was well known in the waste industry, having worked for Waste Management as a developer in her early career and then developing and flipping companies to other public waste entities. She is an expert in waste to energy, RNG and biogas and, as an early employee of Synagro, she helped build the organics residual company into the largest publicly traded wastewater management companies in the US that sold for $700 Mil to Carlyle. Sarber has been credited with orchestrating roll up strategies in the waste and environmental service industries while organically growing business dominance in key regional markets in all regions of the US.
Scott Donachie
Scott Donachie