To be launched on Monday, just as the Paris climate summit gets under way, the project is a first for Australia. At least a dozen backers will pool their electricity purchasing power with the aim of encouraging new wind or solar energy.

It is being led by the City of Melbourne, which carried out a year-long test of the market to see whether there was enough interest for it to be viable.

On the way, the project has collected partners including the National Australia Bank, the University of Melbourne, RMIT and Federation Square.

The group is looking to purchase 120 gigawatt-hours of new renewable energy - enough to power 31,000 homes for a year.

Early next year the consortium will put out a tender calling for projects to come forward. If a viable project is found, those involved will look to buy power from it for 10 years.

The tender will be technology agnostic, and the power could be delivered by one or several projects, not necessarily based in Victoria.

Melbourne Lord Mayor Robert Doyle told Fairfax Media the scheme would not add to the city's costs as it would no longer need to spend $250,000 a year on carbon offsets.

"We expect the price to be highly competitive with our current electricity bill, and then we've got that $250,000 we don't have to spend," Cr Doyle said.

He conceded the amount of power that could be purchased under the tender was modest in the context of state and national supply, but he hoped it would prove a model that others could adopt and expand on.

The scheme will make only a slight dent in the council's target to have renewable energy supply 25 per cent of the CBD's power by 2018. That target would require the supply of about 1200 megawatts of renewable energy. The bulk buy is expected see up to 60 megawatts built.

Councillor Arron Wood said at the moment the city's power supply was hovering at about 10 per cent renewable energy. Victoria's energy mix is dominated by highly greenhouse gas emitting brown coal power generated in the Latrobe Valley.

"This is about changing the energy mix for our city," Cr Wood said.

"We know we can't reach our target with residential rooftop solar, we know we can't reach it by commercial rooftop solar. We need to purchase large-scale renewable energy."

Cr Wood, who heads the council's environment portfolio, is heading to Paris for the climate summit and said he would promote the project while in the French capital.  He will attend a meeting of city governments acting  on climate change at the Paris town hall, a side event to the main United Nations negotiations taking place.

Damien Walsh, the managing director of Bank Australia, another of the project's partners, told Fairfax Media the bank had recently committed to buying 100 per cent renewable energy and had got involved in the scheme to see if it would deliver a competitive price compared to buying renewable energy from existing supply. He said partners were at this stage not bound to go ahead with the project following the tender stage.

Other participants that have so far agreed to be named include RMIT, NEXTDC​, the City of Port Phillip and Moreland City Council.