Google signs five deals for green powering its cloud services

Cloud service giant Google has announced five new deals to buy 781MW of renewable energy from suppliers in the US, Sweden and Chile, according to a report on Bloomberg.

The deals add up to the biggest-ever purchase of renewable energy ever by a company that is not a utility, according to Michael Terrell, Google’s principal of energy and global infrastructure.

Google will buy 200 megawatts of power from Oklahoma-based Renewable Energy Systems Americas’s Bluestem wind project. From the same US state another 200 megawatts will be contributed by Great Western wind project run by Electricite de France. In addition, Google will also power its cloud services with 225 megawatts of wind power from independent power producer Invenergy.

Google’s data centres and cloud services in South America could become carbon free when the 80 megawatts of solar power that it has ordered from Acciona Energia’s El Romero farm in Chile comes online.

In Scandinavia the cloud service provider has agreed to buy 76 megawatts of wind power from Eolus Vind’s Jenasen wind project to be built in Vasternorrland County, Sweden.

In July, Google committed to tripling its purchases of renewable energy by 2025. At the time, it had contracts to buy 1.1 GW of sustainably sourced power.

Google’s first ever green power deal was in 2010 when it agreed to buy power from a wind farm in Iowa. Last week, it announced plans to purchase buy 61 megawatts from a solar farm in North Carolina.