The Richard B. Russell Federal Building in Atlanta may soon be sporting advanced wind energy panels containing dozens of mini-turbines — 9 inches across — that could provide up to 2 million kWh per year of clean power for the building.

The innovative technology is just one part of a $117 million energy services contract that will cut energy use, energy bills and greenhouse gas emissions at 12 federal buildings across Georgia.

The contract between the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) and Southern Company, one of the nation’s largest utilities, was announced Wednesday in Atlanta as part of the Biden administration’s new Climate Smart Buildings Initiative aimed at increasing federal agencies’ use of such energy service performance contracts (ESPC).

Under an ESPC, a private sector company finances and installs energy-efficient equipment on one or more federal buildings, with the goal of providing a guaranteed level of energy savings, usually for an extended term, which for federal contracts can go up to 25 years. The government pays the private company a predetermined amount for the upgrades, but only if the new equipment delivers the energy savings guaranteed in the contract.

As described in a White House fact sheet, these contracts “[pay] for today’s needed renovations with tomorrow’s bill savings without requiring upfront taxpayer funding.”

ESPCs are used in a range of institutional contexts, according to Mark Fowler, director of government affairs for Ameresco, a leading performance contracting company based in Massachusetts. In addition to federal contracts, his company also works with state and local governments and hospitals and schools.

In the case of the GSA contract with Southern Company, the utility has agreed to assure energy savings at the buildings by installing a range of energy and water efficiency upgrades including more efficient heating, cooling and lighting, digital building controls, low-flow and -flush water fixtures and the wind energy panels.

“The investments we’re making here in Georgia demonstrate how investing in sustainability is a triple win ― creating good-paying, clean-energy jobs, reducing energy costs and tackling climate change,” GSA Administrator Robin Carnahan said in an agency press release. “The federal government wants to lead by example by leveraging our scale and buying power to help drive these efforts.”

According to the fact sheet, the new initiative “is expected to catalyze $8 billion of private sector investment by 2030,” create 80,000 jobs and cut GHG emissions from federal buildings by as much as 2.8 million metric tons a year ― “the equivalent of removing 600,000 gas-powered cars from the road.”

The initiative will also leverage $250 million from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the fact sheet said, “to promote innovative decarbonization strategies through performance contracting,” like the Windwall panels planned for the rooftop of the Russell Building in Atlanta.

Developed by Alabama-based American Wind Inc., the panels generate wind power through the “ducted,” smaller turbines, which each sit in a “shroud” or collar that funnels wind into the turbine and increases the wind velocity, said Dan Yost, the company’s chief marketing officer.

“They actually use different math than traditional wind turbines,” Yost said. “We can manipulate the velocity of the wind, so essentially, [the] panels of our wind turbines increase the ambient wind speed by around three times.”

And sitting high on an urban commercial rooftop, the panels also have a very low cut-in speed ― when they start producing power ― of 1.5 mph and can keep spinning with winds as high as 140 mph, according to company spec sheets. They can also operate in extremely low and high temperatures.

The Russell Building will have three 100-kW panels, according to the GSA, and each panel is about 10 feet by 11 feet, Yost said.

‘Get Them Done’

Federal efforts to promote performance contracting are not new. Under successive challenges from former President Barack Obama, federal agencies signed $4.2 billion in performance contracts between 2011 and 2016, with 21 federal agencies awarding contracts for 340 projects.

While many of those projects continued during the Trump administration, advocates say the number of new contracts and investments recently hit an all-time low, with only $251 million in contracts signed in 2021. Biden wants to increase those numbers to a “sustained” $1.2 billion a year by 2030, according to the fact sheet.

A commitment to performance contracting must come from the top, said Jennifer Schafer, executive director of the Federal Performance Contracting Coalition, an industry group.

“When there was never anything coming from the [Trump] White House that said, ‘Hey, these things are good; use them to achieve your goals,’ people just said, ‘It’s a lot of work; we not going to do it. The administration doesn’t care if [we] do,’” Schafer said.

“It certainly will make a difference to have the White House come out and say, ‘We have an initiative around these contracts; get them done,” she said.

Ameresco also sees the initiative as a strategically well-timed opportunity, Fowler said.

“Despite all of the new infrastructure funding investments that Congress has authorized over the last couple of years, there is still a significant gap and need within federal facilities for deferred maintenance and infrastructure backlogs that are going unaddressed,” he said. “Performance contracts offer a really great solution for these entities to address some of their big infrastructure needs and improve their efficiency, improve their resilience.”

Ameresco has done multiple federal projects, including installing over 150 kW of solar panels at the National Archives and Records Administration facility in College Park, Md., but agreed that federal requests for proposals for performance contracts have fallen off.

The allocation of IIJA funds for performance contracting, as outlined in the fact sheet, should provide another significant boost for the industry, Schafer said, allowing federal ESPC agreements to go “deeper.”

“How do you get to net zero? You can’t always do that from energy savings alone,” she said. “You may not be able to achieve all the resiliency you want from energy savings alone, so a little money might go a long way,” for example, by helping to install a microgrid.