Procurement Advocacy: The Hidden Gears of the Clean Energy Transition

Contributed by RNW Staff

When you think about the transition to clean energy it's often easiest to picture the end results: wind turbines, solar panels, and battery storage systems. But before a project is built, a highly complex procurement process is overseen and decided by state public utility commissions (PUC). Utility procurement – and the planning that leads up to it – is the primary way our region's investor-owned utilities decide what energy projects get built, who builds them, and how much it costs ratepayers. That process matters more than ever right now. Recent executive orders in Oregon are pushing utilities and regulators to move faster to capture federal tax credit benefits before they expire and to generally align with the pace and scale needed to maintain reliability and meet state clean energy mandates.

At RNW, we spend hundreds of hours a year deep in the regulatory weeds of procurement to help ensure demand is met with a diverse selection of clean energy and storage resources at the lowest cost and risk to customers. Our role is to advocate for a fair and competitive bidding process: ensuring clean energy is fairly considered and accurately quantified, that there are sufficient pathways for robust competition, and that the pace of procurement matches the realities of the development market while still allowing for sufficient regulatory oversight.

Procurement 101

At a high level, the planning and procurement process typically looks like this:

1. IRPs: Generally every two years, utilities file an Integrated Resource Plan (IRP). This is a 20-year forecast of how much energy they think their customers will need, and their plan to get it.

2. RFPs: If an IRP shows near-term resource needs, the utility issues a Request for Proposals (RFP) based on the PUC’s acknowledgement of that need. This is an open call inviting energy developers and often the utility itself to submit bids to build projects.

3. The Final Selection: The utility scores those bids, selects a shortlist, and asks the PUC to “acknowledge” its final selection of bids, which is essentially the PUC saying that the resources appear to be least-cost, least-risk at the time of selection. 

The core purpose of this structure is to ensure the utility secures the least-cost, least-risk energy for consumers. 

How RNW Gets Involved

The reality is that procurement is technical, long, and deeply wonky. It’s a difficult process to get involved in, requiring staff and resources to read hundreds of pages of utility filings, spot issues, and submit multiple rounds of comments. 

As a member-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit, we occupy a unique space in our region’s regulatory proceedings. Our members, which include renewable energy and storage developers, encounter the real-world friction of utility procurement and help us identify pain points in the design of RFPs. We then aggregate those pain points, translate them into formal regulatory advocacy, and present them directly to the PUCs to push for structural changes. However, our membership is not limited to developers.  Because our membership is a diverse array of for-profit and non-profit interests – including customer advocates and public interest organizations – we further the public interest through our advocacy. To do so, we fight for a reliable, affordable, decarbonized grid. This balance lends us deep credibility in the eyes of commissioners when we advocate before the PUCs who similarly further their own public interest mandate.

What RNW’s Procurement Work Looks Like in Practice

• Reviewing RFP documents before they're issued and flagging provisions that could limit competition, exclude emerging technologies, or skew the evaluation.

• Intervening in commission proceedings by filing formal comments and participating in open meetings before regulators in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana.

• Coordinating among intervenors so that independent power producers are presenting a coherent, well-supported case rather than a fragmented set of individual objections.

• Meeting with Commission staff to elevate any concerns we have with the draft version of the RFP and the utility’s scoring and modeling methodology, which determines how bids are evaluated. 

• Engaging directly with utilities to negotiate changes before an RFP goes to market, which is often faster and more effective than fighting things out in a formal proceeding.

• Serving on IRP advisory committees to shape the upstream planning that determines what utilities will seek to procure in the first place.

Recent Procurement Wins:

• Portland General Electric (PGE) 2025 RFP - In the spring of 2025, PGE launched its second RFP stemming from its 2023 Integrated Resource Plan. As initially written, the RFP would have excluded emerging storage technologies like iron-air batteries and compressed-air storage, and would have required shortlisted bidders to make novel escrow payments. Through our advocacy, PGE removed both restrictions, opening the door to a wider range of storage technologies and eliminating an unnecessary financial barrier to entry. 

• PacifiCorp’s 2025 Situs RFPs -  Breaking from its usual practice of running one system-wide solicitation, PacifiCorp issued two separate RFPs in the spring of 2025 – one for Washington, one for Oregon. Both included provisions that would have significantly narrowed the field of eligible bids: a new deliverability requirement restricting projects to the west side of the company's system, a ban on certain battery storage vendors, and overly strict interconnection and transmission requirements. Our advocacy led PacifiCorp to drop the west-side deliverability restriction to open bidding to projects across its full six-state service territory, lift the vendor ban, and accept bids with conditional firm transmission rights, which allows renewable projects to come online faster. We also secured a commitment from the Commission requiring PacifiCorp to run a second RFP once more clarity on transmission capacity between the west and east sides of its system emerges.

• Avista’s 2025 RFP - Avista initially redacted most of its bid evaluation methodology, making it impossible for bidders to understand how their proposals would be scored against the utility's criteria. The company also hadn't clarified whether it would accept bids relying on conditional firm transmission. After we raised these concerns, Avista released an unredacted version of its evaluation methodology and confirmed it would accept conditional firm transmission bids, improving transparency and predictability for participants.
 
• Tax credits - In light of the impending expiration of federal tax credits for solar and wind projects, we advocated for utilities to accelerate procurement. We wrote letters to the governors of Oregon and Washington, as well as to the Oregon PUC and Washington UTC, requesting that state leaders clearly signal the need for expedited utility procurement. Since then, both governors issued executive orders identifying expedited procurement as a key priority for the state. We also weaved this message into our advocacy work at the PUC and UTC, filing comments in multiple dockets that stressed the importance of timely procurement to secure the expiring tax credits and ensure substantial savings for utility customers. 

Additionally, we worked behind the scenes with Washington’s Commerce Department to identify advanced stage projects and state-level barriers that could be addressed to help these projects receive federal tax credits. Throughout these efforts, we highlighted a range of strategies to accelerate procurement, including issuing timely RFPs, pursuing bilateral procurement opportunities, seeking waivers from procurement rules to advance projects more quickly, and encouraging utilities and regulators to adopt creative approaches.

Procurement may not carry the same visibility as a ribbon-cutting at a new wind farm or solar array, but the decisions made in these regulatory proceedings shape which clean energy projects get built, how quickly, and at what cost to customers. As Oregon and the region navigate rising demand, getting procurement right matters more than ever. In our next procurement blog, we'll dig into some of the specific issues we expect to be on the table at this summer's Oregon PUC workshops, including efforts to speed up procurement timelines without losing the competitive rigor and oversight that keep the process fair for ratepayers.