Wind and Solar Deals Popular With Tech Giants Opening to All

Buying electricity from big wind and solar farms has long been the province of tech giants. An exchange opening Tuesday aims to open those deals up to everyone.

LevelTen Energy Inc. has lined up more than 800 clean-energy projects for an online clearinghouse designed for small and mid-sized companies to buy power, Bryce Smith, founder and chief executive officer of the closely held Seattle-based company, said in a phone interview Sunday.

The effort is designed to broaden the market for so-called power purchase agreements with big renewable-energy projects. That arena has typically been confined to the likes of Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and others with ravenous appetites for electricity and deep enough pockets to buy power by the gigawatt.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance analyst Kyle Harrison said LevelTen’s exchange may “open the door for a lot of smaller companies to enter the space” by allowing them to take advantage of economies of scale offered by utility-scale projects.

For example, companies seeking to buy 60,000 megawatt-hours of electricity annually could buy from a large project that generates ten times that amount — pe