An innovator accelerating the shift to clean energy with excellent solutions: Apex Clean Energy

The Silicon Review

Since day one, the Apex Clean Energy team has been driven by a shared passion to accelerate the shift to America’s clean energy future. Apex strives to excel in every phase of project realization. Apex’s mission-driven company seeks determined, resolute individuals who innovate and go above and beyond the call of duty. Apex began as a small start-up in 2009, and the passion of those early days still permeates its now mature company. Apex employees are known for taking the initiative and feeling empowered in their everyday decision making. Apex is always upfront with its partners and investors—even if the news isn’t the most positive. This transparency and trust ensures that Apex’s business becomes a repeat business.

Apex’s safety performance is second to none. The company works hard to cultivate a culture of safety throughout the company and employ a proactive, collaborative approach to prioritizing safety in every initiative. Apex refuses to wait for incidents to happen. The company seeks solutions that transcend its business model to lower individual and collective environmental footprints. Apex invests in socially responsible practices and shares its expertise to expand opportunities for others to further the transition to a better, more sustainable future. It’s a simple concept. Uncertainty increases risk, and risk chills investment markets. For the past two decades, Apex’s sector has operated under recurring periods of uncertainty. The politics surrounding incentives for utility-scale clean energy development resulted in a constant boom/bust cycle, unrelated to actual market demand and energy pricing. Recently, the industry has experienced tailwinds as major corporations have committed to 100% clean energy, 21 state governments have set 100% clean energy or net-zero goals, and global infrastructure investors increasingly partner with forward-thinking solutions providers like Apex to fight climate change. Yet the market remained constrained, lacking clear direction from the federal government about its commitment to the energy transition.

Capturing the Highest-Value Renewable Energy Resources

Since day one, Apex has prioritized investing in the experts and infrastructure necessary to bring renewable energy projects from idea to conception. As the saying goes, it’s all in the details. For Apex, that means equipping itself with thousands of geographic information system (GIS) data sets that originate with more than 65 discrete government agencies, private vendors, and municipal sources, all of which are updated weekly, monthly, annually, or quinquennially. But the thousands of data sets and millions—if not billions—of individual data points would be useless without a critical piece of the puzzle: the team behind the maps. Without those experts in place, the figures are simply static information.

“Many renewable energy developers outsource all geographic mapping work, but Apex’s internal GIS group is involved from project inception and enables the entire Apex team to visualize a project,” says Jess Cummings, senior GIS analyst at Apex. “Using our data sets and a growing library of records from Apex’s meteorological towers sited across nearly two dozen states, we can map anything from wind quality and market forecasts to transmission capacity and airspace restrictions.” Even before Apex targets a Greenfield site or acquires a project, the GIS team is sharing constantly updated intelligence with colleagues throughout the company to determine the best wind and solar resources from coast to coast. “We can map a project earlier in the process and more often during development than many other companies are able to if they’re outsourcing this work,” says Cummings.

As things change and evolve at the project level, the Apex team can see the results immediately—rather than waiting days or weeks to fully understand the potential consequences. Ultimately, Apex benefits from a more intelligently and efficiently developed portfolio of projects.

Fine Tuning in the Field

With millions of data points to track, it’s inevitable that a few bits of information from one of Apex’s sources won’t be up to date when the team needs its files to be 100 percent accurate. To ensure maximum precision as a project reaches the advanced development stage, the GIS team confirms its understanding of a project with micrositing trips. That process of collaborative analysis continues over the years spent on a project’s development, and in real time. As commissioners in Illinois regulate turbine setbacks from roads, occupied structures, and property lines in their county, for instance, the GIS team can immediately determine the impact to an Apex project in that area. Three to eight Apexers—usually a team member each from GIS, engineering, wind resource, and construction—traverse the site to verify every turbine location and ensure there aren’t any surprises that are digitally invisible.

“For instance, on a trip out to a Michigan project, we found the newly poured foundation of house just steps from a proposed turbine site,” says Cummings. “Because we invested the time and energy to verify our data, we found the new construction and were able to take action to move the turbine and site it responsibly.” Three years ago, Apex’s GIS analysts trekked project areas with paper maps, later inputting geo-tagged photos from their smartphones into the company’s digital mapping programs. On today’s micrositing trips, analysts use an advanced GIS application to enter, edit, and update data in real time on their iPads. On-site at a wind project in Kansas, Cummings can upload photos of a potential turbine site, and instantly, the project developer can vet the information from more than 1,000 miles away at the company’s Charlottesville headquarters. That immediate and all-encompassing ability to access and interact with the data brings even more value to the work of the GIS team. As the real estate team signs parcels and developers pin down another met tower location, any individual can update the web platform to ensure the entire group has the most current understanding of a project.

Mark Goodwin, President and Chief Executive Officer