Google will purchase the bulk of electricity produced by the Björkvattnet onshore wind farm as part of its renewable energy spending spree.
The Swedish deal has been negotiated with GE Renewable Energy, which backed the project’s developers and supplied tanks for the 175-megawatt project. Power from the site will be used for Google’s regional data centres.
Neha Palmer, manager of operations at Google, said the organization is trying to add renewable power where it uses it. A fast glance at the origin of its global data centers and its wind and solar investments would imply that coverage is being delivered .
Google’s European solar and wind purchases overlap neatly with its data centers in Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland and Denmark. Data centers require substantial quantities of electricity, much of which can be used for cooling. Scandinavia is proving a big winner in the data center market with low ambient temperatures and high renewable energy accessibility proving attractive with Google, Microsoft and other large operators.
The Björkvattnet deal is among 18 announced earlier this month as Google completed a total of 1.6 gigawatts’ value of renewable energy procurement on three continents.
The project was created by Vindparken and WindSpace, and can be owned by the private equity firm InfraVia Capital Partners.
GE’s 5.3-megawatt Cypress turbines are being installed in the website, which is expected to begin commercial operation annually.
Observing the earlier takeoff of the U.S. market, Europe is enjoying a corporate power-purchase arrangement boom of its own, albeit one which is far from uniform in its makeup. Different offtakers, technology and market conditions have made the continent’s PPA landscape hugely varied.
In the south, Spain’s vast pipeline of solar power projects is bringing diverse company attention. Contracts are signed with steel giant ArcelorMittal, food supply company Uvesco, retail bank Kutxabank and telecom firm Euskaltel.
Farther north, the U.K. has seen consumer-facing brands like Unilever, Mars along with the major supermarket chains engaging with the market for both solar and wind.
In Northern Europe, end dominates. Several of Scandinavia’s mining and materials firms have made moves . The aluminum giant Alcoa has more than 800 megawatts of PPAs set up in Norway.
There’s scope for more need from tech firms in the future too, as Google’s deal with GE demonstrates. Cisco estimates annual average growth in Western European data centers of 17% from 2016 to 2021; it expects the lion’s share to be constructed in Scandinavia. Earlier this year Microsoft selected Sweden to get a clutch of”sustainable” data centers which will be 100 percent renewable-energy powered. Facebook has spent almost $1 billion in a pair of information centers in Luleå, Sweden.
Typically, corporate PPAs provide a long-term financial guarantee for your project’s investors who can soften any regulatory fluctuations and help push a job into the realms of bankability. In some markets the economics haven’t made sense or the regulatory framework for PPAs is absent.
Germany’s appealing subsidy regime has left PPAs unnecessary — so far. According to the law firm Bird & Bird, 4 gigawatts of onshore wind capacity reaches the conclusion of its support at the end of 2020. Another 2.4 gigawatts will be trying to find post-subsidy deals each calendar year thereafter. Bird & Bird expects this to induce German PPA deals in the near future.
