In March 2013, LegalZoom purchased a 206,000 square-foot building in Northwest Austin. Austin is a great city and there are a million reasons a company would want to set-up an office there; in LegalZoom’s case, there were a million-and-one: the City of Austin actually entered into a partnership agreement of sorts, to provide LegalZoom with an annual development grant of $20,000 in exchange for meeting certain hiring goals as well as investing at least $1,000,000 in tenant improvements and another $750,000 into “Machinery and Equipment,” which seems like an odd requirement for an online company.
A quick glance at the property’s permit history, reveals they overshot the tenant improvement quota by putting about $3M into tenant improvements in July 2013, courtesy of Harvey Cleary Builders. Our guess is that the $658k they put into the 260kW panels installed by Meridian Solar, basically takes care of the “Machinery and Equipment” requirement from the City of Austin. According to Meridian, 864 photovoltaic modules were installed, which will produce an estimated 345,800 kWh in the first year (kWh is is a unit of energy equivalent to one kilowatt (1 kW) of power expended for one hour).
The good news is that this will save LegalZoom an estimated $22,000 in annual utility costs; the bad news is that the total annual utility bill for their gargantuan office is at least 10x this number. Still, it is a good start and kudos to LegalZoom for stepping up.
Check out our building permit map to see who else has gone solar in Austin.
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