Google to Meet All Energy Needs From Clean Power

Google, the biggest corporate buyer of renewable energy, is buying even more—536 megawatts of wind power from four power plants.

As part of the Alphabet Inc., Google has agreed to buy 196 megawatts of wind power from two Avangrid Inc. power plants under development in South Dakota, according to a statement on Thursday.

It also agreed to buy 200 megawatts of wind power from an EDF Renewable Energy project in Iowa, according to a separate statement on Thursday. And it agreed to buy 140 megawatts of wind power from an Oklahoma wind project built by Enel SpA. Terms of the deals were not disclosed, Bloomberg reported.

Google has now signed enough renewables deals to match all of its energy needs this year, though not all the projects are currently operational. The company has agreed to buy 2,397 megawatts of clean power in the US and 3,186 megawatts overall, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Amazon.com Inc. is the second biggest corporate buyer, with 1,219 megawatts, all in the US. Its “electricity consumption is considerable, but for them to meet that already by buying renewable energy is a huge achievement”, Kyle Harrison, a New York-based analyst at BNEF, said in an interview on Thursday. “Google is buying renewable energy across three continents and has paved the way for dozens of other companies.”

In the Avangrid deals, Google will buy the output from Coyote Ridge and Tatanka Ridge wind projects. Each of them has 98 megawatts of capacity and combined will produce enough electricity to power more than 50,000 homes.

EDF’s Glaciers Edge Wind Project in Cherokee County is expected to become operational in December 2019. Enel’s 300-megawatt Red Dirt wind farm in Kingfisher and Logan counties will go into service by early next year.