Commercial, Solar, Sourcing Renewables, Wind  -  July 24, 2017

Google signs PPA with Dutch solar plant

Google recently signed a second power purchase agreement with a Dutch electricity provider to power its new data center in the region by the provider’s solar plant.

The search engine company announced July 7 that it signed a ten-year deal with Eneco to receive energy for its 600 million euro Eemshaven, Netherlands, data center from the Sunport Delfzijl PV plant, the largest Dutch solar farm, according to a news release.

Google will receive all the electricity generated by the 30-MW solar farm over the length of the contract. The installation includes 123,000 solar panels over 30 hectares in the northern region of the Netherlands, according to the release.

In 2014, it signed its first agreement with Eneco to receive power for the Eemshaven data center, which opened in 2016, from the supplier’s Delfzijl wind farm, according to CleanTechnica. The new agreement ensures the Dutch data center will now receive power from the energy company’s wind and solar farms.

“Worldwide, we have already contracted the delivery of 2.7-GW of green electricity, which makes Google the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy,” Marc Oman, EU energy lead at Google, said in a statement. “Contracts like this give companies like Eneco the economic certainty to invest in new renewable energy capacity.”

The recent solar farm agreement follows a 12-year PPA Google announced in early July to begin receiving power from Norway’s Tellenes Wind Park in September.

The PPAs reflect Google’s recent commitment to power all its operations with renewable energy by the end of 2017. This is the fourth Google data center located in Europe and one of several agreements signed with European suppliers to receive wind and solar power.

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