Ameresco Plots Larger Role for On-Site Solar and Storage

Ameresco is best known as a commercial and industrial energy services company, or ESCO, competing against giants like Honeywell, Siemens, Johnson Controls and a host of other national and regional providers on HVAC retrofits, LED lighting upgrades, and other building energy-efficiency services. The Massachusetts-based company also has a significant military microgrid resume for C&I customers looking for always-on power.

But like every other modern ESCO, Ameresco is seeing a growing opportunity for solar PV and energy storage to play a role in its customers’ holistic energy needs — at least in the markets where they make sense. Jacqueline DeRosa, Ameresco’s vice president of energy storage, says that list of markets is quickly expanding.

“Ameresco is everywhere and very well known on the East Coast,” both in the U.S. and Canada, she said in an interview last week. But in the past year, it has also acquired companies that have given it a West Coast renewable energy footprint, including TerraNavigator, a California-based company specializing in brownfield solar and landfill methane capture projects, and Quantum Engineering, an energy service company serving schools, universities and municipalities in Oregon and Washington state.