There was a news nugget in the American Wind Energy Association’s latest market report (released last week, the executive summary can be found here) that should be required reading for electric utility executives everywhere: Non-utility purchasers (that is, corporate and institutional customers) signed power purchase agreements (PPAs) for more than 1,300 megawatts of windpower in the fourth quarter of 2015—accounting for roughly 75 percent of the total.

Translation: Corporate America is going green and if you don’t give them what they want, they are going to get it on their own.

This transition has been under way for some time—Whole Foods, for example, said it planned to go all-in for windpower in 2006 and Walmart signed its first major windpower deal in 2008—but it wasn’t until 2013 that the change really began to take hold. Since then, it has been an entirely different story, almost an overnight transition from “meh” to “let’s do this.” According to data from RMI’s Business Renewables Center, corporate buyers signed power purchase agreements for more than three gigawatts of new wind and solar power in 2015, two and a half times the 1.2 GW of green power purchased in 2014. And this is just the beginning, says Hervé Touati, head of the BRC. “Despite this incredible success, less than 20 corporations have been active in this space since its inception. This is just a start….”

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