The City of Cadillac, a Michigan municipality of roughly 10,400 residents in Wexford County, has contracted Budderfly and Schneider Electric to install distributed energy and efficiency upgrades across seven municipal facilities under an energy-as-a-service agreement carrying no upfront cost to the city. Budderfly will fund approximately $4.4 million of capital expenditure and recover it through a 15-year shared-savings arrangement, according to reporting by the Cadillac News on the July 20 council vote. The deal was publicly announced on August 5, 2026, and marks the first municipal customer in Budderfly’s portfolio.
Seven Sites Anchored By Water And Wastewater Load
The covered facilities are city hall, the wastewater treatment plant, the Chestnut Street community center, the department of public works garage, the water department headquarters and well fields, and a Local Development Finance Authority treatment plant in the industrial park.
That mix is load-weighted toward water infrastructure rather than office space, which matters for the economics. Pumping and aeration are continuous, motor-driven loads with high and relatively predictable demand charges, making them the most attractive targets for on-site generation and peak shaving.
City Manager Marcus Peccia has described energy as one of Cadillac’s largest operating expenses, per the Cadillac News account of the council meeting.
The Contract Converts Capital Expenditure Into A Savings Split
Under the structure described by Budderfly, the company finances, owns, deploys and operates the assets, and guarantees savings over the term. The city pays nothing upfront and instead shares realised energy savings with the provider.
Christian Edwards, vice president of business development and strategy at Budderfly, told the council the savings split runs for 15 years, after which the full benefit reverts to the city. Edwards estimated savings of around 65 percent against current spend, a figure that is a vendor projection rather than a measured or independently verified result.
For a city with a median household income below $52,000, the appeal is balance-sheet treatment as much as absolute savings. No bond issue, no millage, and no competition with the separate $8.2 million state-administered grant Cadillac is pursuing to extend municipal water to homes on PFAS-affected private wells.
Solar Plus Storage Is Sized For Peak Shaving, Not Islanding Alone
The technical package spans rooftop and site solar, battery energy storage, HVAC and lighting retrofits, EV charging, and microgrid controls intended to keep essential services running through grid outages.
Edwards told the council the savings come primarily from on-site generation combined with storage and controls that let the city shift consumption away from expensive peak windows. That framing puts demand-charge management, not backup power, at the centre of the business case, with islanding as a resilience byproduct.
Microgrid Knowledge reported that the charging component will use Schneider’s ChargePro Level 2 hardware installed behind the microgrid boundary, meaning vehicle charging remains available when the utility feed drops.
Schneider Electric Supplies Controls, Budderfly Supplies The Balance Sheet
Schneider’s contribution is energy management and building automation rather than capital. The company provides the monitoring, control and optimisation layer across the seven sites, which is the technology that determines whether the projected savings actually materialise over the term.
The division of labour is a useful signal for procurement teams. In this model the integrator carries technical risk through controls and lifecycle services, while the EaaS provider carries financing and performance risk, and the municipality carries neither.
The data generated by that controls layer is itself becoming a commercial asset, a dynamic explored in Kurrant’s analysis of how distributed energy resources are opening data opportunities for smart city vendors.
Cadillac Is A Proof Point For A Segment Budderfly Has Not Served
Budderfly built its business on repeatable commercial footprints such as quick-service restaurants, retail chains and assisted living. Edwards said the company has around 100 client sites in Michigan and thousands nationally, with Cadillac its first municipal account.
The company reported more than $250 million in revenue for 2025 and has raised over $1 billion in total capital, including a $550 million debt facility expansion led by Global Infrastructure Partners, according to the Hartford Business Journal. Its August 2026 announcement put its footprint above 9,000 customer locations.
Municipal work introduces different friction: open meetings, procurement scrutiny, multi-year council turnover and asset ownership questions that chain restaurants do not raise. A council member described the proposal as seeming too good to be true before voting for it, and the approval was ultimately unanimous.
The Deal Sits Inside A $7.5 Billion Financing Coalition Racing Incentive Deadlines
Cadillac was originated through Schneider Electric’s Accelerating Resilient Infrastructure Initiative, launched in Boston on September 18, 2025 with more than 20 partners and $7.5 billion in identified capital, per the launch announcement. Founding participants included Microsoft, AlphaStruxure, Sunrock Distributed Generation, Zurich, Arcadis and Unison Energy.
The coalition has since grown to more than 40 members, with Budderfly among the additions. Schneider has been explicit that the initiative is designed to move projects while federal incentives remain available, a window narrowed by tax credit provisions in the 2025 reconciliation package.
Facilities Dive reported that a Schneider spokesperson put the Cadillac cycle at roughly six months from initial engagement to council approval, and identified smaller communities with limited internal capacity as the segment the initiative expects to scale into.
Resilience Framing Rests On National Figures, Not Local Outage Data
Schneider and Budderfly both anchor the resilience argument in an estimated $150 billion annual cost of power outages to the U.S. economy, a figure Schneider attributes in its own materials and which the companies repeated in the Cadillac announcement.
Local reliability data offers a more mixed picture. Aggregated utility filings compiled by FindEnergy put Wexford County at roughly 0.99 interruptions per customer per year averaging about 133 minutes, fewer outages than the national average but longer ones, a profile consistent with rural distribution networks in northern Michigan.
That duration gap is the relevant variable for a wastewater plant. Extended outages, not frequent brief ones, are what force diesel dependence and regulatory exposure on water treatment operations.
What The Cadillac Structure Tests For Other Small Municipalities
The transferable question is whether a savings-share model priced against a chain-restaurant cost base holds up across a public portfolio with irregular load shapes and public-sector procurement overhead.
“This project is about taking a smarter, more resilient approach to serving our community,” said Marcus Peccia, City Manager, City of Cadillac, in the August 5, 2026 announcement issued through PR Newswire.
No construction schedule, commissioning date, solar capacity in kilowatts, or battery capacity in kilowatt-hours has been disclosed publicly. Those figures, alongside the first year of measured savings, will determine whether Cadillac functions as a replicable template or a one-off.
