The power plants FCR builds, owns and operates are engineered and designed for continuous and affordable power product delivery. The vendors FCR selects, whether large or small, help us to deliver on that promise.
FCR has contracted with some of the largest energy companies in the world for the supply of our products. Our vendors are an essential part of the product delivery chain and committed to FCR’s mission of available, affordable, renewable energy.
FCR has contracted for the (trade) of our renewable energy products with some of the largest energy marketing companies and most recognizable clean energy brands in the world. Using energy industry standard contracting methods, FCR has (created) a credit worthy, open ended, purchase facility that will enable FCR to execute on its MBRC mission (Market Based Renewable Commodities), bringing affordable, clean and renewable energy products to market. FCR's purchase facility, as a market based transactional platform, doesn't require the heavy credit commodity pricing support non-market utility-based PPA's require. As well, our purchase facility is not constrained by utility tariff boundaries or pricing structures. As a result, FCR can develop projects in markets where others cannot, leveraging open market demand and liquidity as key transactional indicators.
An important part of a market based energy transaction is the dispatchability of the power plant the commodities are produced at. Being dispatchable is a requirement of the balancing authority who manages the grid systems the power plant is interconnected to. Being dispatchable allows the grid operator to manage the generating resources connected to their transmission system. For the generator, in a market-based transaction, it represents an additional stream of revenue and revenue management. Unlike a utility PPA, FCR is first person to the balancing authority and can optimize the transmission of our energy commodities (revenue) on the grid and to our customers. This adds great value to the products we supply to our energy buyers and creates additional streams of revenue and revenue control others (developers) don't have access to. When the balancing authority needs to relieve congestion on our part of the transmission system, they will ask us to "turn down" our dispatchable power plants and, in doing so, pay FCR a premium for the MWh we can't get to the system and our customer (virtually).
The products that FCR's power plants produce are sold in a free market, commodities trading environment. The energy trading market is a multi-billion dollar (an hour) transactional behemoth that constantly strives to meet the worlds demand for energy. The dynamics of this market are impacted by many factors and can change instantaneously. Strategies to manage risk in this market are very well vetted and FCR can make use of those strategies just as other energy marketing companies have historically. One of the most common is to diversify commodity risk by diversifying the energy products FCR brings to market. FCR will own and operate waste to energy, biogas and renewable electricity power plants, all producing commoditized energy products. This portfolio diversity of product placement in the market helps to limit the commodity market risk out amongst the various products. So when one energy commodity is performing poorly, the others are performing well. This portfolio diversity also helps to manage (institutional and regulatory risk) at both the project level and product level.
FCR minimizes our developmental and long term operational risk in many other strategic ways by having multiple off-takers or buyers for our commodities, multiple vendor solutions and even at the process level, we implement diverse process solutions to insure our power plants are available to provide our products to market.
In the more literal sense of the word "diversity" FCR has off-take agreements in place with UGP (United Gas and Power), one of very few minority owned energy-marketing corporations.