Google joined the list of major companies investing in clean energy following Microsoft and Apple.
The tech giant plans to power 100 percent of its operations with clean energy by 2025. For that, it will work on a series of new wind and solar projects around the world.
Google called this announcement as the largest, and most diverse, purchase of renewable energy ever made by a non-utility company.
The company has already signed agreements to buy wind energy from a farm in Sweden and solar energy from a plant in Chile.
These long-term contracts range from 10-20 years and provide projects with the financial certainty and scale necessary to build these wind and solar facilities.
“For our part, these contracts not only help minimize the environmental impact of our services—they also make good business sense by ensuring good prices,” Google said in its announcement.
Today’s agreements will add an additional 842 megawatts of renewable energy capacity to power Google’s data centers.
“Across three countries, we’re nearly doubling the amount of renewable energy we’ve purchased to date. We’re now up to 2 gigawatts—the equivalent to taking nearly 1 million cars off the road,” Google said.
With world leaders coming together at the COP21 UN conference on climate change in Paris this week, Google said there’s no better time to focus on renewable energy.
In 2010, Google entered its first large-scale renewable power purchase agreement with a wind farm in Iowa. In the subsequent years, it has completed a number of similar large-scale energy purchases.
In November, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates pledged to launch a multi-billion-dollar clean energy research and development initiative. Large companies such as Amazon, General Motors and Facebook have also taken similar steps.
Arya MM