Solar project developer Candela Renewables, LLC, San Francisco, California, will provide Google with 140MW of power from a facility in Texas as part of a new power purchase agreement (PPA). As part of the deal, Candela will develop a new solar power project to supply green energy to Texas’ ERCOT power grid. The agreement is a part of Google’s biggest renewable energy purchase ever, announced by them in September 2019, which is also the largest-ever corporate purchase of renewable power – overall, a 1,600 MW package that will comprise 18 new energy deals, of which Candela’s PPA is a part.
The collaboration stems from Google’s ambition to purchase 1.6GW of renewable electricity via 18 energy deals. Announced last September, the clean energy ramp-up sees the tech giant purchase energy from 720MW of solar farms, split between Texas (490MW), North Carolina (155MW) and South Carolina (75MW) – more than doubling the capacity of its global solar portfolio as of 2019.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that most of the company’s renewable energy purchases in the US were wind-driven up until last year, but the declining cost of solar “made harnessing the sun increasingly cost-effective”.
Google, with 1,107MW, was second only to Facebook (1,546MW) last year in terms of corporate renewable energy procurement in the US, according to the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance.
Candela Renewables, which was founded in 2018 by former First Solar employees, has a portfolio of more than 3.6GW of utility-scale solar projects and 2.2GW of co-located energy storage.
“The team at Candela has pushed itself to not just develop renewable power and storage, but to create projects and find partners that move the entire industry forward in innovative ways that have an impact beyond an individual piece of infrastructure,” the company said.
