The PPA, the long-term contract between an electricity producer selling electricity to a pantograph or receiver, has been and continues to be the backbone of competitive electricity markets and is the linchpin of financing power generation projects. In a relatively short period of time, independent power producers (IPPs) that previously relied heavily, if not exclusively, on traditional PPAs have seen their purchase options evolve and expand with the availability of financially billed hedging products, the dramatic growth of virtual PPAs, and the next generation of renewable energy PPAs that include more complex supply strategies. such as Google`s Carbon Free Energy (CFE) program. It`s a convoluted system, but long-term PPA contracts give Google the peace of mind of knowing how much we`ll pay for future energy, while giving renewable energy developers the stability to fund and build new projects – thus maintaining the principle of “additionality” that any electricity deal should bring more renewable energy into the grid. “Of course, this purchasing structure was not optimal, because we basically have to buy electricity `twice` – once at the wholesale level and again at the retail level,” says Demasi. “But 2009 did not yet exist optimally.” From a contractual perspective, this isn`t ideal, but since regulated utilities offer little or no retail options to buy renewable energy, it`s often the only way to buy renewable energy in the utility space on the same grids where we consume. The question is, “How do you get retail credit for the renewable energy you buy at the wholesale level?” Paris, Monday, September 30, 2019 – GE Renewable Energy today announced the signing of a Corporate Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) to sell the energy from the Björkvattnet onshore wind farm to Google. GE Renewable Energy has launched and negotiated the Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) to sell the majority of the electricity produced by the wind farm to meet the renewable energy consumption of Google`s data centers in the region. GE Renewable Energy announced in early September that it would supply 33 of its 5.3 MW Cypress turbines for the Björkvattnet onshore wind farm in Sweden. The 175 MW site is located about 470 km north of Stockholm and will produce enough renewable energy to power the equivalent of 175,000 households in Sweden. The project was developed by Vindparken and WindSpace with the support of GE Renewable Energy and sold to InfraVia European Fund IV, managed by InfraVia Capital Partners, a private equity firm specializing in the infrastructure sector.

The wind farm is expected to enter commercial operation by the end of 2020. Google also tweeted: “Sustainability has been one of Google`s core values from the beginning. We`ve been carbon neutral since 2007 and today we`re proud to announce that Google is making our biggest purchase of renewable energy to date. In addition to buying energy in North and South America and Europe, Google bought its first power in Asia in 2019 when it bought power from a 10 MW solar farm in Taiwan. This white paper describes a new, more scalable approach that allows a wide range of companies like Google to purchase large amounts of renewable electricity directly from electric utilities. In 2017, the company`s wind and solar power purchases accounted for more electricity than the company consumed in its offices and data centers, a feat it repeated in 2018. We have been very successful in getting significant amounts of renewable energy at competitive prices compared to non-renewable sources, proving that you can do great things for the planet and support the results. But in many ways, PPAs remain an imperfect model. And while there are more options today than in 2009, few utilities offer renewable energy to their customers. “There needs to be considerable development in the utility sector,” Says Demasi, “so that we can buy the electricity we want from the source we want, with the contractual flexibility and agility we need.” The industry is making good progress. But we are still far from an ideal system to bring renewable energy from where the wind blows and the sun shines to where people live and work.

To provide such a “load by-product”, the PPA provider will likely need to generate from multiple renewable resources (a mix of solar, wind, hydroelectric and/or geothermal) and integrate a storage solution. In addition to requesting a portfolio of assets under management (or contracts), the PPA provider must apply a high level of sophistication in terms of electricity planning and delivery by the grid operator. CEO Sundar Pichai wrote: “This means that we do not buy electricity from existing wind and solar farms, but we make long-term purchase commitments that lead to the development of new projects. The traditional PPA involves the purchase, sale and supply of physical energy via an IPP to a supply customer on the bus bar, i.e. the top side of the transformer next to the power generation plant. The buyer under a traditional PPA is often a vertically integrated utility that then sells electricity to retail customers in its service area, which is closed to competition. In 2010, for example, Google applied to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for market-based tariff authorization, that is, the right to buy and sell electricity on wholesale electricity markets in the United States, which very few other non-energy companies had received at the time. We completed our first PPA later this year with a 20-year contract with a 114-megawatt wind farm in Iowa. In 2009, our data center energy team began investigating power purchase agreements (PPAs): large, long-term contracts to purchase renewable energy in quantities that meet our business needs. The idea behind using a PPA is simple: Google can`t buy clean energy from our utilities due to regulatory restrictions on our retail contract, and we can`t produce enough behind the meter in our data centers due to physical and geographic restrictions.

But we can buy it at the wholesale level directly from developers in the same networks where we manage our data centers. This is the second wind power purchase agreement between the two companies. Google Energy is also purchasing 114 megawatts of clean, renewable energy from NextEra Energy Resources` Story II Wind Power Center in Story and Hardin counties in Iowa. Google has announced that it will enter into the largest Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) in its history with the purchase of 1.6 GW of renewable energy worldwide. Google recently announced that it has made its largest purchase of renewable energy to date, totaling more than $2 billion in new energy infrastructure produced by solar panels and wind turbines worldwide. “Sustainability has been one of Google`s core values since the beginning, and one of the cornerstones of our related efforts is our commitment to clean energy,” said Neha Palmer, Google`s chief operating officer. “Today`s announcement will add new renewable energy to the grids we use it on, create new construction jobs and make clean energy accessible to surrounding communities. The purchase includes 18 new companies in the energy sector and will increase the company`s renewable energy portfolio from just over 3.8 GW to nearly 5.5 GW, an amount that the company says is greater than the renewable energy capacity of countries like Lithuania and Uruguay.

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