IT giant boosts its access to renewable energy by 842MW through latest wave of power purchase agreements
Google has become the latest global company to use the Paris Climate Summit as a backdrop for a major new clean tech announcement, unveiling its largest set of renewable energy power purchase deals to date.
The company, which has been investing heavily in renewables projects as part of its efforts to triple its purchasing of renewable power by 2025 and power 100 per cent of its operations from clean energy, announced it had inked deals with six planned projects, totaling 842MW of capacity.
The projects include four deals in the US, which will see Google purchase power from two 200MW wind projects from RES Americas and EDF Renewable Energy, as well as a 225MW wind farm operated by Invenergy and a 61MW Duke Energy solar project. In addition, a deal has been signed with an 80MW Acciona Energia solar project in Chile and a 76MW Eolus Vind wind farm in Sweden.
Writing in a blog post announcing the move, Urs Hölzle, senior vice president technical infrastructure at the company, said the deals were "the largest, and most diverse, purchase of renewable energy ever made by a non-utility company".
He added that the agreements would allow the developers to move forward with the projects, bringing more clean power onto the grid. "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," he wrote. "For our part, these contracts not only help minimize the environmental impact of our services-they also make good business sense by ensuring good prices."
The deals are the latest in a series of high profile green commitments from multinational companies at the Paris Summit, including Monday's pledge by a group of technology entrepreneurs to mobilise billions of dollars of investment in clean tech R&D.
