Client Profile: Renewable Properties

Renewable Properties develops & operates solar, energy storage, & EV infrastructure projects. Partnering with local communities & landowners across the U.S.

Transcript

Aaron Halimi
President & Founder, Renewable Properties, LLC

My name is Aaron Halimi. I'm the Founder and President of Renewable Properties. We're a few different things. First and foremost, I wanted to build a company that prioritized company culture, prioritized its employees the way in which we carry ourselves and the way in which we work. The company was also founded with the idea of focusing on distributed energy resources, specifically small-scale utility and community solar projects throughout the United States. The idea was to take an institutional approach to an otherwise fragmented area of the market and to grow our business focused in this underserved area.

How is your company contributing to the industry?

We go out and we secure land and we turn it into renewable energy and we do that extremely well. We do a variety of other services within the renewable energy ecosystem, but what we do best and what we prioritize as our main core competency is greenfield development. Our project approach is really centered around securing well-located real estate. We're trying to find sites that have a high likelihood of success in making their way all the way through the development process. And we do that by taking the time upfront to diligence the path to permitting. We then move to kind of site-specific characteristics. You know, we look for sites that have the right topography, that avoid wetlands, that avoid flood zones, that are proximate to existing electrical infrastructure, that have legal access. And so, we take all of that data upfront and then run a bunch of models to come up with a list of candidates and a list of, you know, sites that we want to pursue for developing renewable energy projects and then we go out and we do it. And that's what we do. And that's what I think is a key to our success as a greenfield developer is we take a more focused approach. It does take us a little bit longer to maybe enter a market than the next guy. But when we enter a market, we know that we have a higher likelihood of success with that site that we're taking on and we're making an investment in actually making it all the way to coming online and pumping renewable energy into the grid.

There's been a lot of pivotal moments over the last seven and a half years running renewable properties. The early days of building the company as a greenfield development shop, you know, when you have only a handful of projects under development, that makes development even that much more risky of a business proposition. You know, when we had projects that were making their way towards development complete or project monetization, making sure those projects actually got their permits and got their approvals was mission critical at that point in time. Now where we have 170 projects under development across the United States, it's a little bit of a less risky proposition. You're not as concentrated on an individual's project success or failure.

What projects have had the biggest impact on your success?

So, our first project that we developed was a project called American Canyon. It's in Napa County serving the local CCA there. And that was a big project for us. It was kind of make or break, and fortunately, we developed it, built it, and still own and operate it. And so that was a big one. There's another project fast-forwarding a couple years later, the project called Lake Herman, where that was in Solano County, specifically in Benicia, California, very close to the Bay Area, serving the same utility customer, but at a much bigger scale. And the stakes there were bigger because at the time we were selling that project to take that capital and recycle it back into the business to continue to run our business. And so that was a pretty high stakes project. And then even just most recently this last year, we've moved from a traditional independent power producer model where we would finance and hold majority of our projects to now selling some of our projects at NTP. And so, in 2024, we've had a lot of success in the state of Illinois with a portfolio of projects, both in ComEd and Amherst service territory. What's been key, I think, to my company's success is the people developing renewable energy projects. There's no patent, there's no trade secret. And so, we prioritize people at our company. We do a variety of things, acknowledging individual successes and milestones. We do shout outs of the week, you know, as small as, we secured a new site option agreement to as big as we sold a project to everything in between. People want to come to work and they want to feel good about where they're coming to work. And so, in order to do that and to prioritize that company culture, it has to be front and center. And so, it's something that myself and my executive team talk about on a weekly basis. It's something that we're very tuned in on, and it's something that we certainly prioritize.

What challenges has your company encountered as it has grown?

You know, developing renewable energy projects is a capital-intensive business and so we're always looking for new capital partners. We have a suite of great capital partners right now that we're very fortunate to be working with. Stoel Rives has really been our main outside counsel from the start. I've known Brian Nese at Stoel Rives for as long as I've been in the industry. So they worked with me when I was starting my company. It was just me and my rent-controlled apartment in downtown San Francisco sitting at my kitchen table, helping me, you know, set up my LLC and all of the, you know, operating agreements. So, they've been a great partner of us over the years, and they've grown with us over the years. And we continue to be happy with the services that they provide us.

What long-term impact are you aiming to achieve?

Long-term impact we're aiming to achieve is to combat climate change. We believe that we can fight this thing. We believe that we have the technical solutions at hand and we just need to be able to deploy them at scale. And there's all sorts of types of projects that are needed. We focus on community solar and small-scale utility. You know, those projects are smaller than if we were to focus on large-scale utility, but we need a mix of all of it in order to solve this thing. What excites me most about the future is the unlimited opportunity there is right now in distributed energy resources. When I started my business, we focused specifically on small-scale utility solar. We then moved into community solar. We then started doing solar plus storage as well as standalone energy storage. And most recently, we've gotten into developing EV infrastructure. There's just a tremendous amount of growth and opportunity in front of us.