Singaporean state-owned energy company Sembcorp has signed two 18-year power purchase agreements (PPAs) with US-headquartered data centre manager Equinix to supply 75MW of solar power to the latter’s facilities in Singapore.
The deal is Equinix’s first renewable PPA in Singapore, and will see Sembcorp supply a total of 105MW of power capacity to the company’s data centres, the majority of which will be sourced from solar projects.
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The PPA follows a number of other renewable power deals signed by Equinox, as the company looks to become carbon neutral by 2030. In February, Equinix announced the signing of its 21st PPA, and its first in Australia, and such deals have become an increasingly important part of meeting the world’s decarbonisation targets; last year, Maria Popova of the European Federation of Energy Traders told PV Tech Premium that such deals are “an invaluable instrument” for reaching these targets.
Sembcorp has 727MW of solar capacity in operation in the country, including the 60MW Tengeh floating solar farm, Singapore’s first large-scale floating PV project, and the growth of Singaporean renewables will be of benefit for the country as a whole, which has set a number of ambitious renewables targets.
Singapore is aiming to be net zero by 2050, but natural gas accounted for 94.3% of the country’s fuel mix as recently as June 2023, with the government’s Economic Development Board expecting natural gas to make up more than half of the Singaporean energy mix as late as 2035.
However, the government also expects renewable imports to account for 30% of the energy mix by 2035, and the overseas investments made by companies such as Sembcorp could help meet this target. The company has recently announced a number of new solar projects, including the signing of a deal for a 440MW solar-plus-wind project in India, and the development of a solar-plus-storage project in Indonesia.
