Big tech corporations want huge quantities of fresh power to energy their quickly rising data-center fleets whereas assembly their local weather objectives — nevertheless it’s more and more troublesome to get that electrical energy from the grid.
One resolution? Start constructing information facilities and photo voltaic, wind, and battery farms in shut proximity to one another, placing as little stress on the grid as attainable.
On Tuesday, Google unveiled a first-of-its-kind strategic partnership to do precisely that. The tech large and its companions goal to construct $20 billion in renewable-energy and energy-storage property by 2030 that can be “colocated” with information facilities.
Procuring carbon-free power has turn into a prime precedence as Google and different main tech corporations like Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta scramble to construct the info facilities required to attain their artificial-intelligence visions. Sourcing sufficient carbon-free energy to gas these energy-intensive services isn’t straightforward given the nation’s tangled and backlogged transmission grids, nevertheless it’s a necessity if these corporations are to satisfy their formidable clear power targets.
Google’s companions on this effort are TPG Rise Climate, the local weather funding arm of TPG, a non-public fairness agency with $239 billion below administration, and Intersect Power, an power developer that’s raised greater than $1 billion in fairness and $5 billion in undertaking finance with the specific goal of connecting gigawatts of photo voltaic, wind, and battery initiatives on to large new electrical energy hundreds — together with information facilities.
Intersect Power is already financing the partnership’s first colocated clear power undertaking, which is anticipated to start out working at an undisclosed website in 2026 and be absolutely full by 2027. As a part of Tuesday’s deal, Intersect Power additionally introduced that it had raised greater than $800 million in an fairness funding spherical led by TPG Rise Climate and together with Google and different present traders.
“We’re siting subsequent to energy technology and creating these industrial parks — nonetheless related to the grid on the substation or interconnection level, however eradicating the bottlenecks to bringing technology on-line and in addition hundreds on-line,” Amanda Peterson Corio, Google’s world head of knowledge middle power, instructed Canary Media. “Where we will implement this technique, we expect it’s a nice approach to cut back grid stress and make new load as clear as attainable.”
That’s the speculation a minimum of. To date, Intersect Power’s 2.2 gigawatts of photo voltaic and 2.4 gigawatt-hours of battery initiatives in California and Texas have all been grid-connected. Providing steady, round the clock energy on to information facilities utilizing photo voltaic and wind farms backed up by batteries, fossil-gas mills, and minimal grid energy is a largely untested prospect.
But Intersect Power CEO Sheldon Kimber has insisted for years that rather more low-cost clear energy can be wanted than is at the moment being added to the grid due to the large new electrical energy hundreds like information facilities, inexperienced hydrogen manufacturing, direct air seize of carbon dioxide, electrification of business thermal hundreds, and large-scale EV-charging depots.
“We see this as BYOP — deliver your individual energy,” Kimber instructed Canary Media. “And the extra BYOP you possibly can obtain, the decrease the influence on the localized grid,” plus there’s “huge optimistic influence on rural areas of constructing billions and billions of {dollars} of infrastructure.”
“In sure locations within the nation — the panhandle of Texas, Oklahoma, into Kansas — the place the wind useful resource is sweet and the photo voltaic useful resource is sweet sufficient, with the addition of battery storage, you will get to a place the place 80 percent-ish of the hours of the yr are powered on-site by clear power,” he stated.
Building the info facilities the place the clear energy is
To date, the problem for Kimber’s imaginative and prescient has been convincing clients to find huge new initiatives within the components of the nation the place wind and photo voltaic are most plentiful. But the increase in electrical energy demand from information facilities has given Intersect Power a probability to place its concept into motion.
New information from consultancy Grid Strategies finds that forecasts of latest electrical energy demand on the U.S. grid have skyrocketed previously two years from 23 gigawatts in 2022 to just about 128 GW as of December 2024, with information facilities driving the lion’s share of anticipated progress.
This surge is threatening the nation’s decarbonization objectives as utilities plan to construct gigawatts of latest fossil-gas energy crops and maintain coal crops open longer to assist it. It’s close to not possible for utilities so as to add power capability on the velocity tech corporations want; it could actually take as much as 5 years to construct and join a new power undertaking, however solely a yr or so to deliver a new information middle on-line.
In a September report, the Sierra Club referred to as on tech giants and data-center builders to demand cleaner alternate options from utilities and regulators, similar to extra renewable power paired with batteries and extra transmission strains to share clear energy between areas, with a view to stop the data-center buildout from derailing local weather objectives. But it additionally referred to as on massive energy customers to website new hundreds in components of the nation the place extra clear energy is obtainable.
“It’s clear this AI increase is pushing utilities to construct actually, actually quick,” Laurie Williams, director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign and co-author of the September report, instructed Canary Media. “And in the event you do need to construct actually quick” — and maintain clear power commitments, she added — “don’t go to constrained components of the nation.”
For its half, Google has pledged to energy its information facilities with round the clock carbon-free power by 2030. That goal is now threatened by Google’s rising urge for food for energy to feed its cloud-computing and AI ambitions and by the rising problem of getting new clear energy constructed and related to the grid. The firm reported in July that its emissions rose 13 % in 2023 from the earlier yr and 48 % since 2019.
