Dive Brief:
- Google has signed a trio of 20-year power purchase agreements with Clearway Energy Group that will provide the tech conglomerate with 1.17 gigawatts of “carbon-free energy projects” to support its data center operations, Clearway announced last week.
- The three projects will help support Google’s data centers in Missouri, Texas and West Virginia, across three different transmission and power markets, according to a Thursday press release. Clearway said that the PPAs were executed in 2025.
- Google and Clearway have an existing 71.5 megawatt PPA in West Virginia, which brings the total partnership to 1.24 GW, the energy producer and developer said. The newly announced deals represent over $2.4 billion in energy infrastructure investments, according to the release.
Dive Insight:
Google has a goal to reach net-zero emissions across its supply chain by 2030, but the tech company’s emissions have been rising due, in part, to the increased adoption of artificial intelligence. Despite decreasing its data center emissions 12% year-over-year in 2024, the tech giant said in its latest sustainability report that its emissions are up 51% from a 2019 baseline.
As part of the agreement, Clearway will begin construction on new projects that total over 1 GW, with new generation expected to come online in 2027 and 2028, Clearway said in the Jan. 15 release. The three projects will come online on grids managed by the Southwest Power Pool, Electric Reliability Council of Texas and Midcontinent Independent System Operator.
“Strengthening the grid by deploying more reliable and clean energy is crucial for supporting the digital infrastructure that businesses and individuals depend on,” Google’s Global Head of Data Center Energy Amanda Peterson Corio said in the release.
The San Francisco-headquartered Clearway, which signed a PPA with Microsoft and a long-term battery storage procurement agreement with Tesla in 2025, has a 13 GW portfolio that spans over 350 operating projects across 27 states. The energy company’s Senior Vice President of Origination Valerie Wooley called the latest deal with Google “the next step in Clearway’s accelerated digital infrastructure development program” that will bring additional capacity to Google’s data centers “across regions experiencing historic load growth,” according to the release.
The PPAs represent a return to Google’s typical decarbonization approach of partnering with utilities and power developers to bring new clean energy capacity online. It follows a move by Alphabet, Google’s parent company, to acquire clean energy developer Intersect for $4.75 billion. Google is currently a minority owner of Intersect, and the deal is expected to close in the first half of 2026.
