Technology giant Google will purchase renewable energy certificates (RECs) from a 600MW solar and energy storage portfolio in the US state of South Carolina.
The projects are being developed by New York-based renewables developer energyRe and mark the second collaboration between the two companies. Details of the development timeline or the specific projects under contract have not been revealed. According to its website, energyRe is developing eight utility-scale PV projects between 60MW and 75MW capacity in South Carolina.
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Head of data centre energy at Google, Amanda Peterson Corio, said that the RECs would “help power our data centres and the broader economic growth of South Carolina.”
RECs are financial commitments to buy credits equivalent to renewable energy capacity, rather than a concrete power purchase agreement to buy the power itself.
Last month, the International Energy Agency (IEA) forecast that global electricity demand from data centres would more than double by 2030, driven predominantly by AI data centres. The cluster of big tech companies in the US, through entities like Google, Meta and Amazon, will see US data centre demand grow by up to 130% by the end of the decade, the IEA said, second only to growth in China.
The same tech companies are the largest corporate buyers of solar PV capacity in the US, according to data from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA). Google ranked third at the end of Q1 2024 with over 2.4GW of PV capacity investments, behind fellow tech leviathans Amazon and Meta.
These companies have quite strong decarbonisation targets (Google aims to decarbonise its “operations and value chain” by 2030) and are simultaneously expanding data centre capacity, which requires ever greater electricity supply.
Google has signed several multi-hundred-megawatt financing and energy purchase deals in recent months. In January, it signed a 724MW PPA with Leeward Renewables for PV capacity in Oklahoma and financed an 800MW PV project in Illinois last August with Swift Current Energy.
