Biggest Google Purchase of Solar Power for New Facilities

Google has signed a deal with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to purchase the output of several new solar farms. The renewable energy will be used to power two upcoming Google data centers, one in Clarksville, Tennessee, and another in Jackson County, Alabama.

Two of the solar farms will each produce around 150MW, this combined will be the biggest solar farms ever to have been built for Google. 

This purchase by Google and TVA consists of a total 413 megawatts of power from 1.6 million solar panels. The equivalent of powering 65,000 home rooftop solar systems.

“Deploying solar farms does more than provide a cost-effective way to procure clean power,” Amanda Corio, senior lead for energy and infrastructure at Google, said in a blog post. “It will also create economic benefits for Tennessee and northern Alabama.”

 

“TVA’s developer partners – NextEra Energy Resources and Invenergy – will hire hundreds of workers in the region, make long-term lease payments to property owners, and generate millions of dollars in economic activity and tax revenue for the broader community.”

 

So far, Google has more than 30 long-term contract commitments to purchase renewable energy around the world, which results in nearly $5 billion in investment. This started back in 2012, when the company made it’s aim to purchase enough renewable energy to match totally their operations, which makes them the the world’s largest corporate buyer of renewable energy.

 

 

In 2015 Google consumed 5.7 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity across all of its operations, about the same as San Francisco used in the same year. In 2017, the company purchased more than seven billion kilowatt-hours of electricity from solar and wind farms that were built specifically for the project.