Late last week, Google announced its latest renewable energy purchases brought its wind and solar capacity to more than 3 gigawatts and made good on the company’s commitment to running on 100% renewables.
One of the deals was a power purchase agreement (PPA) covering the full output of Avangrid Renewables’ Coyote Ridge (98MW) and Tatanka Ridge (98MW) Wind Farms in South Dakota.
“Working with partners like Google who have made a commitment to 100% renewable energy for their global operations is exciting and inspiring,” said Avangrid Renewables President and CEO Laura Beane. “This partnership creates a positive impact in these local communities, delivering jobs, new investment and economic development for rural America while advancing our country’s energy independence.”
The other two PPAs were signed with EDF Renewable Energy (200 MW of wind power in Iowa) and Grand River Dam Authority (138.6 MW of wind capacity in Oklahoma).
Hitting the target was a big jump from 2016, when Google’s various energy deals produced enough renewable electricity to cover 57% of its operations.
Sam Aarons, Senior Lead, Energy & Infrastructure at Google, said the latest purchases cemented Google as the “largest corporate purchaser of renewables on the planet”.
Google set itself a 100% renewable energy goal back in 2012 and claims it has been carbon-neutral since 2007.
“While we’ll still be drawing power from the grid, some of which will be from fossil fuel resources, we’ll purchase enough wind and solar energy to account for every megawatt-hour (MWh) of electricity our data center and office operations consume annually,” states a 2017 progress update (PDF); published prior to the most recent PPA deals.
In addition to wind power, Google has a significant amount of solar energy in its portfolio.
One of the more recent solar deals it has struck was in July, when the giant of search inked an agreement to purchase all the electricity generated by the largest solar farm in the Netherlands. Consisting of 123,000 solar panels, output from the Sunport Delfzijl facility will be used to power the company’s new Eemshaven data center.
Other solar facilities associated with Google PPAs are a 61MW plant in North Carolina, USA and the El Romero facility (80MW), situated in in the Atacama Desert in South America.
Google also has on-site solar at its Mountain View campus (2MW total), some of which was installed nearly a decade ago and was the first corporate installation of on-site solar power of its kind. Google isn’t done with on-site solar yet; with its new Charleston East campus to reportedly feature solar panels.
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