How to Create Your Renewable Energy Strategy

Clean energy solutions can be added to a company piecemeal, but there's substantial synergy in aligning sustainability initiatives across different business units and planning in phases. PowerFlex's recent State of the Industry 2025 report clarified the business case for investing in clean energy solutions. Companies that responded to the survey cited that their renewable energy strategy was building their company's energy independence, resiliency, and property value while foregrounding environmental sustainability for their customers.

Making a renewable energy strategy helps your company have a reference point when new challenges or opportunities arise. It's a living document that can be adjusted to incorporate new technology, incentives, or changes to business operations. Let's examine how to prepare for and create a renewable energy strategy and how to proceed once you've conducted the research and engaged stakeholders.

What You Should Know Before Creating Your Strategy

Like other business initiatives, a renewable energy strategy should align with your business goals and objectives. Implementing this strategy involves understanding what options are available, which ones serve your purposes and can be funded effectively and efficiently, and how you'll address challenges.

Clean Energy Expertise and Education

It can be easy to assume that whatever widely trending clean energy initiatives will be the right fit for a given business. Still, most companies will make more attuned choices when members of their teams deepen their clean energy education. Consulting with experts, reading through collections of information like the PowerFlex Resource Hub, and genuinely documenting which options are available for a site like your commercial locations changes the question from "Should we get involved in clean energy?" to "Which of these viable clean energy projects makes sense for us now and going forward?"

The State of the Industry Report in 2025 showed that many teams wish they had more knowledge to connect the dots. For instance, 78% of organizations feel their senior leadership lacks effective knowledge on implementing clean energy solutions. Getting this information and education into the hands of key stakeholders is a top priority before charting a path forward.

Financing Renewable Energy Projects

Clean energy is and likely always will be an investment, so boosting your clean energy education involves getting realistic budgets for the potential projects you'd like to take on. We believe the ROI of clean energy emerges in the details, and becomes even more compelling when you're located in states or other zones offering incentives for adding clean energy initiatives to a commercial location.

Federal and state incentives, tax breaks, and rebates defray the costs of renewable energy projects. Tracking policies and incentives and planning when an appropriate incentive opens the funding cycle can help you maximize your chances for funding and keep your ROI as fast as possible. Conducting pilot projects can be a great way to establish for a broad range of internal stakeholders all the value your clean energy investments can bring.

Once the clean energy pilot projects generate data (and often revenue!), it becomes easier to develop a renewable energy strategy that involves internal investment in the documented benefits your business has chosen to prioritize.

Listen to Your Customers, Too

Your organization's senior management and executive board may have varying levels of commitment to particular renewable energy initiatives, so a good way to clarify your preparations would be to learn your customers' ESG goals. The 2025 PowerFlex State of the Industry report reveals that 50% of organizational ESG strategies were influenced by customers among survey respondents. Customers are becoming more sustainability-sensitive and are growing their discernment between those who mention sustainability and those who live it out in their business operations.

Your customers may show you that a particular initiative is important to them or want to see major changes to emissions without needing you to pursue a particular clean energy strategy. How your customers feel about environmental sustainability can be part of the guiding background for a functional sustainability strategy.

See What Others Are Doing

A great way to assess the scale or scope of your sustainability strategy is to see who among your competitors is moving toward low emissions and clean energy and how they are rolling out those initiatives. They may also have faced challenges and roadblocks you can learn from and account for before committing to particular projects.

As you review what competitors are doing, you may find yourselves designing a strategy that keeps you relevant or up-to-date, but that's only one way to use these pieces of data. You may also find that sustainability is a key point of differentiation if none of your competitors have entered this space yet: if you want to be an industry leader on clean energy and know that you're the first in your sector to commit in a big way, your plan might give you a significant new brand recognition compared to others.

Adhere to the Latest Regulations to Stay Compliant

Compliance and regulations are significant areas to track. At the same time, your clean energy installation and design partners should be up to date with regulations. You'll want to keep your finger on the pulse of federal and state laws and regulations. This information can help you when selecting vendors who will provide clean energy equipment, as vendors who stay current with regulations will also help you stay connected to the most relevant policies.

Benefits of Bundling Solar Energy Projects

While pilot projects serve their purpose, many businesses realize they can best achieve their goals by bundling solar energy projects with EV charging stations. For example, Raghav Murali, the Director of Policy and government Affairs at PowerFlex, mentioned the benefits of solar parking canopies combined with EV charging stations, saying, "We have some projects where we like to have everything under the sun to reduce customer energy costs."

Depending on location, various incentives are available at the federal and state level, at multiple levels. These incentives are with more complete, end-to-end clean energy projects. Data from our customers shows that some of these projects bring a synergistic effect over the long term, achieving more together than would be possible with piecemeal installations over time.

Track Progress with a Clean Energy Maturity Model

The Clean Energy Maturity Model helps organizations assess how their current level of adoption of clean energy fits with the five stages identified. The model offers familiar points about the challenges at each stage, identifying opportunities and brand differentiation that come with every bit of progress.

The maturity model allows you to understand how you currently use clean energy assets in relation to your peer organizations and the potential on your site. The five levels range from explorer and adopter at the beginnings of a clean energy journey, then progress ot optimizer, leader, and innovator throughout additional growth and commitment to clean energy in every aspect of business.

Take our self-assessment quiz to learn more about where your company is in the model and how the stages can help you identify and address your current challenges and opportunities.

Developing Your Renewable Energy Strategy

To put together your renewable energy strategy with the information you've gathered above, you'll take this process and make it your own.

1. Integrate renewable energy into your organization's vision, operations, goals, and objectives. What key factors matter regarding how you'll realize a renewable energy project or series of projects?
2. Engage with key stakeholders to share the vision and make adjustments.
3. Dig into the finances and ensure stakeholders recognize the value of various timelines and where particular funding will come from.
4. Create a preliminary plan that can be taken to a clean energy partner organization with experts who can help you determine feasibility further. They may suggest a sustainability audit or conduct it themselves, address potential site-specific challenges, push for compliance measures that will save you effort, and fill in knowledge gaps.
5. Work with your partner organization to track progress, implement projects, and monitor them for clarity in future phases or projects.

Ready to Create Your Renewable Energy Strategy?

As you can see, much of the implementation-level planning will need to be done in concert with a clean energy partner; most businesses do not have on-staff experts in sustainability, and choosing a long-term partner like PowerFlex can help you benefit from their depth of clean energy expertise and their commitment to your entire project lifecycle.

PowerFlex can help you build a solid foundation for your strategy through energy audits, site evaluations, and financial modeling. Once you begin your project, our energy management platform provides ongoing monitoring and data to inform the evolution of your strategy over time.

No matter where you are in your clean energy strategy planning, now is a great time to contact PowerFlex and learn how we can partner with you to realize your goals. Reach out today!