Disseminated on behalf of SolarBank Corporation.
SolarBank Corporation (NASDAQ: SUUN; Cboe CA: SUNN, FSE: GY2) teamed up with Viridi to build a 3.06 megawatt (MW) ground-mounted solar project. This project will also include a 1.2 megawatt-hour (MWh) battery energy storage system (BESS) in Buffalo, New York. This initiative plans to turn a closed landfill into a useful asset, providing clean energy to the local community.
Project Overview
- Location: Buffalo, New York
- Solar Capacity: 3.06 MW (DC)
- Battery Storage: 1.2 MWh
- Site: Repurposed closed landfill
In this collaboration, SolarBank will own the project, while Viridi will supply the battery storage system. The company has secured a lease for the site. It is now getting interconnection approval. Once the company gets the permits and funding, construction will start. The facility will then work as a community solar project.
Power Packed: Viridi’s Cutting-Edge Battery Solutions
Viridi equips its lithium-ion battery packs with integrated fire suppression and anti-propagation technology, adhering to stringent safety standards. Viridi’s design is different from traditional methods. It isolates each battery cell. This prevents thermal runaway. So, if one cell fails, it won’t cause bigger problems. Viridi is backed by a tier 1 management team, including the former Global Chairman of Investment Banking from JP Morgan.
Shared Sunshine: Empowering the Community with Solar
Community solar projects allow multiple participants to benefit from a single solar installation. Subscribers get credits on their electricity bills for their share of solar power. This lets them use renewable energy without needing their own installations.
Recently, SolarBank advanced two community solar projects in Skaneateles, New York, totaling 14.4 MW DC to power about 2,100 homes. The projects have completed the Coordinated Electric System Interconnection Review (CESIR) and are now proceeding with permitting.
The company aims to qualify for incentives under the NYSERDA NY-Sun Program. Once operational, these installations will supply clean energy to the local grid, offering residents access to renewable power without installing personal solar panels.
Storing the Sun: The Crucial Role of Battery Storage
Battery storage plays an important role in the energy transition. It helps integrate renewable sources, such as solar and wind, which can be unpredictable. Without effective storage, surplus energy can go unused, and grid operators may struggle to balance supply and demand. BESS technology solves these problems. It captures and stores electricity for later use, boosting efficiency and reliability.
The Growing BESS Market
The global Battery Energy Storage System market is growing fast. This rise comes from new technology and more use of renewable energy. In 2024, the market was valued at around $7.8 billion and is projected to reach $25.6 billion by 2029, growing at an annual rate of 26.9%.
In 2024, global BESS installations hit 205 GWh. This marks a 53% increase from the previous year, exceeding expectations. The grid-scale sector led this growth with 160 GWh deployed, 98% of which utilized lithium-ion technology.
Notably, 17 projects exceeding 1 GWh became operational in 2024, up from four in 2023. It shows there’s a strong pipeline for large projects. LFP batteries stay on top of the market because they are cheaper and have better technology.
- Looking ahead, over 400 GWh of grid projects are in the pipeline for 2025, though at least 30% may face delays or cancellations.
One of the key factors supporting this expansion is the significant cost reduction in battery systems. Over the past two years, solar module prices have decreased by 66%, while battery system prices have dropped by 58% in the last year.
Cost cuts have made renewable energy projects cheaper. This change encourages more investment in energy storage solutions.
Regional Expansion and Market Trends
Countries around the world are boosting their battery storage capacity. This helps them meet renewable energy goals.
China led the market with 67% of global BESS deployments. This was due to provincial mandates and falling battery costs. The U.S. and Canada followed, installing nearly 40 GWh, with California contributing half of this capacity.
Meanwhile, Europe’s battery storage market could exceed 50 GW by 2030, with an estimated €80 billion in investments supporting this expansion.
In the United States, battery storage capacity hit about 24 gigawatt-hours (GWh) in 2024. This is a 71% rise from the year before. Utility-scale battery capacity has seen rapid growth in the country, with over 20 gigawatts (GW) added in the past 4 years—equivalent to the capacity of 20 nuclear reactors.
This capacity may double to 40 GW by 2025. This shows how important battery storage is for a stronger grid and more renewable energy use.
These developments underscore the critical role of BESS in stabilizing the grid, reducing reliance on fossil fuels, and ensuring a consistent supply of renewable energy. SolarBank’s latest transaction positions the company at the forefront of this rapidly evolving battery storage market.
Bright Horizons: SolarBank’s Strategic Expansion
The Viridi BESS project aligns with SolarBank’s strategy to expand its portfolio of renewable energy assets across North America. The company plans to improve the reliability and efficiency of its solar systems. It will do this by using advanced battery storage solutions. This way, they can offer sustainable energy to different communities.
- As of February 20, 2025, SolarBank’s stock is trading at US$ 4.02, reflecting the market’s response to the company’s ongoing initiatives in the renewable energy sector.
With its expansion into battery storage, SolarBank is proactively addressing one of the biggest challenges in renewable energy—energy intermittency. By combining solar power with advanced storage solutions, the company is strengthening the foundation for a cleaner, more reliable energy system.
SolarBank is investing in BESS as demand for sustainable energy grows. This move will boost growth, attract new partnerships, and strengthen its leadership in renewable energy.
SolarBank’s partnership with Viridi shows its dedication to new renewable energy solutions. This effort helps in the larger goal of moving to a sustainable, low-carbon energy system. By repurposing a closed landfill into a productive solar and battery storage facility, the project not only provides clean energy to the Buffalo community but also sets a precedent.
This article contains forward-looking information. Please refer to the SolarBank press release entitled “SolarBank Partners with Viridi on Combined 3.06 MW Solar and 1.2 MWH Battery Energy Storage Project Located in Buffalo, New York.”
Disclosure: Owners, members, directors, and employees of carboncredits.com have/may have stock or option positions in any of the companies mentioned: SUUN.
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The post From Waste to Watts: SolarBank and Viridi Intend to Transform a Landfill Into a Solar Powerhouse with Battery Storage appeared first on Carbon Credits.
Most businesses that decide to act on their net-zero targets reach the same point of friction. Buying carbon credits has meant tracking down brokers, sitting through sales calls, and requesting a quote just to learn a price, sometimes with limited proof of what you are buying.
The earnings calls that quietly reframed climate from sustainability question to operating risk.
Three earnings calls in the last 18 months tell the story without any help from a press release.
Hershey, May 2024: cocoa price exposure compresses margin, and the company attributes part of the cost shock to West African weather. Olam, July 2024: coffee climate exposure quantified in the annual report. JBS, January 2025: supply chain climate disclosures expanded materially in response to investor pressure and regulatory expectation. None of these companies issued the announcement as climate news. They issued it as financial news. The climate-linked supply chain risk did not arrive with a sustainability framing; it arrived as a P&L line.
You are probably reading this article because you suspect the same thing is happening to your business. This piece walks through what is showing up on which earnings calls, how procurement and finance leaders are quantifying the exposure, and what serious corporates are doing about it before the regulator asks.
Where climate risk has already appeared in earnings
The pattern is consistent across resource-intensive sectors. A weather event compresses supply, the price spikes, the cost flows through the income statement, and the analyst on the call asks whether the event is anomalous or structural. Increasingly, the honest answer is the second one.
Cocoa is the cleanest example. The 2023 to 2024 West African harvest fell sharply on the back of erratic rainfall and disease. Cocoa futures more than tripled. Companies with concentrated West African sourcing absorbed the cost; companies with diversified sourcing absorbed less. The exposure was not climate as ESG topic. It was climate as cost of goods.
Coffee follows the same pattern. Brazilian and Vietnamese harvests have moved on weather more sharply across the last several seasons. Roasters with long-tenor supplier relationships and origin diversification have managed the volatility; roasters with spot-market exposure have not. Wheat, sugar, palm oil, beef: the same dynamic in different commodities, a pattern the IPCC AR6 Working Group II report projects will intensify across agricultural systems through mid-century.
What this means: climate risk is no longer a footnote in the 10-K. It is a line item the CFO has to explain on the call.
The three commodity exposures that hit margin first
For most companies with material Scope 3 exposure, three exposures dominate the near-term P&L risk.
- Concentrated single-origin sourcing in a climate-vulnerable region. If your tier-one supply for any material commodity sits in one geography, you have a concentration risk that climate amplifies. Diversification across origins is the obvious hedge, but it takes years to build and requires relationships you cannot acquire by tender.
- Supplier financial fragility under climate stress. Smallholder farmers, who supply a large share of the global cocoa, coffee, and palm oil market, do not carry the balance sheets to absorb yield shocks. When yields collapse, they exit. When they exit, your supply base shrinks, and the surviving suppliers raise prices. The risk is structural, not cyclical.
- Logistics and storage exposure to extreme weather. Hurricane disruptions to Gulf shipping, drought-driven Panama Canal restrictions, flooding in European inland waterways: each of these has moved input costs in the last three years, a pattern documented in Munich Re’s natural catastrophe data. The exposure shows up as a one-quarter event in the financial press but accumulates over time on the cost line.
TCFD and ISSB disclosure changes
The disclosure architecture has now caught up with the risk. The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, whose recommendations are now embedded in the ISSB’s IFRS S2 climate standard, requires companies to disclose climate-related risks across physical and transition categories, with quantification where possible.
For physical risk specifically (the climate-linked supply chain risk you are reading about), the disclosure must address both acute exposures (extreme weather events) and chronic exposures (gradual changes in temperature, precipitation, and growing seasons). The disclosure must address the time horizon over which the risk is material, the parts of the value chain exposed, and the financial impact under different scenarios.
The CSRD imposes similar requirements under European law, with double materiality (both financial and impact materiality) embedded in the assessment. The practical effect: your auditors and your investor relations team now need a defensible answer to the climate-linked supply chain risk question, and the answer needs to be quantified.
What procurement and finance can do now
Three actions matter near-term.
Map your exposure. Most companies do not have a clear view of which tier-one and tier-two suppliers sit in which climate-vulnerable geographies. Without the map, you cannot quantify the risk, and without the quantification, you cannot disclose it credibly. The map is the foundation, and World Resources Institute climate risk research provides useful public tooling to start.
Diversify and deepen, in that order. Diversification across origins reduces concentration risk, but the deeper move is to invest in the resilience of the suppliers you already have. Regenerative practices, agroforestry, soil health interventions: these reduce yield volatility under climate stress and protect your input cost trajectory.
Embed the climate spend inside procurement, not outside it. Treating climate risk as a sustainability cost line subordinates it to the ESG budget. Treating it as a procurement and resilience investment puts it in the budget that matters, which is the cost-of-goods budget that the CFO defends quarterly.
Nature-based supply chain investments are the asset class designed for exactly this purpose. They sit inside the value chain, they reduce climate-linked supply risk, they generate verifiable Scope 3 reductions, and they produce the documentation an auditor and a regulator can both test.
If you are quantifying climate-linked supply chain risk in advance of the next earnings cycle or the next disclosure period, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can help you map your exposure and structure a Dual-Value Model response that addresses reduction, resilience, and disclosure-readiness in a single program. Schedule a consultation.
More and more small and medium-sized businesses are hearing the same question from their larger customers: What is your carbon footprint? That question now travels down entire supply chains, and it arrives next to tender requirements, certification criteria, and rising customer expectations.
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