Invenergy, a developer, owner and operator of clean energy projects, will provide 225 megawatts (MW) of wind power capacity for US tech giant Google to power its data centres.
The power purchase agreement signed with Invenergy is one of six partnerships Google announced during the COP21 conference in Paris, totalling an additional 842MW of renewable energy that will go towards powering its data centres and helping the tech company triple its clean energy purchases by 2025.
The latest agreements nearly double the amount of renewable energy Google has purchased, bringing the total to 2 gigawatts (GW). According to the company, this is the equivalent of taking one million cars off the road. Google has previously stated that it intends to power 100 percent of its operations with clean energy.
The wind power will be harnessed at the Bethel Wind Energy Facility, a new wind farm in Texas whose construction is slated to begin next month. The plant will generate approximately 965,000 megawatt-hours (MWh) of renewable energy annually, Invenergy said in a statement.
The other contracts Google announced in December are with Duke Energy (61MW solar), RES Americas (200MW wind), EDF Renewable Energy (200MW wind), Acciona Energia in Chile (80MW solar) and Sweden’s Eolus Wind (76MW).
“These long-term contracts range from 10-20 years and provide projects with the financial certainty and scale necessary to build these wind and solar facilities – thus bringing new renewable energy onto the grid in these regions,” Google said in a blog post.
Invenergy did not disclose the length of the PPA nor the cost of the deal. A spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.
In addition to being the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy in the world, Google is also one of the largest corporate investors in the sector, having entered agreements to fund nearly $2.5 billion worth of wind and solar projects.
To date, 37 percent of the tech company’s operations are powered by clean energy, a percentage Google expects to increase significantly in the next two years.
