Google made its largest ever offshore wind investment to decarbonize European data centers

Google has invested in an additional 700 megawatts of renewable energy to power its European data centers, the company said today. Those megawatts are coming from projects that span offshore wind, onshore wind, and solar, in the Netherlands, Italy, and Poland, respectively.

• The top line: The deal in the Netherlands marks Google’s largest offshore wind project to date, and will bring 478 MW of carbon-free energy capacity via two new-to-the-grid offshore wind farms. The slew of European agreements are part of the company’s efforts to operate data centers on 100% carbon-free energy by 2030.
• The nuts and bolts: In addition to the Dutch offshore wind project, Google also announced its first long-term PPA for an onshore wind project in Italy, two new solar PPAs in Poland, and two onshore wind PPAs in Belgium. Those projects are all virtually settled PPAs, but in certain markets — like Taiwan, for instance — Google acts as a direct offtaker.‍
• The market grounding: The largest cloud providers have set goals to fuel their processing power with clean energy, but explosive demand for artificial intelligence has complicated matters. Google and its peers are experimenting with a range of technologies to clean up the massive electricity needs of data processing, including demand response and load shifting, nuclear power, and geothermal energy.

One of the biggest challenges facing corporate 24/7 clean power goals like Google’s is ensuring the flow of clean electrons from renewables physically reaches data centers. Amanda Corio, Google’s global head of data center energy, said that the company’s goal requires that PPAs bring renewable energy into the local grid where offtake occurs. 

“For some of our PPAs we do have physical delivery of the electrons from the projects, or they are delivered through a wheeled contract, where we are paying for the wheeling across the system to be physically delivered,” Corio told Latitude Media.

Regardless of PPA structure, there are a number of things Google can do to track the electrons that ultimately power its data centers, she added, including tracking the local grid’s clean energy percentages on an hourly basis.

Once operational, Google’s latest agreements will bring the grid local to its two Dutch data centers to 90% clean energy this year, Corio said.

Another challenge is the inherent variability of wind and solar, which can necessitate the buildout of additional capacity. The Uptime Institute found that meeting 100% carbon-free energy from wind alone would require data center operators to install three to five times the amount of megawatts they actually need. 

Google’s portfolio is onshore wind heavy, Corio said, but the company is pushing to balance that with solar.

“We are actually targeting solar projects in markets like MISO and SPP where historically we’ve done wind,” she said, “because we want to create that balanced power delivery.” 

Energy storage is another emerging way to mitigate the need for capacity, Corio added. Some of the company’s offshore wind projects are testing storage “to help smooth out the profile of the projects,” she added.