Google Signs Second PPA With Eneco For New Dutch Data Center

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Google has signed its second power purchase agreement with Eneco, one of the Netherlands’ leading electricity providers, for all the electricity produced from the country’s largest solar park for the internet behemoth’s new data center.

Google and Eneco announced the latest power purchase agreement (PPA) last week, the second such PPA between the two companies in the Netherlands. In November of 2014, the two companies revealed that Google’s newest data center in Eemshaven in the Netherlands would be completely powered by renewable electricity from the get-go, thanks to a PPA for all the electricity produced from an Eneco wind farm in Delfzijl, near Eemshaven. The Google data center was the “fourth hyper efficient facility in Europe” and the PPA was the third for Google signed in Europe in an 18 month period.

“We promised that our new Eemshaven datacenter would run on renewable energy from day one of operation — and it will,” said Francois Sterin, Director Global Infrastructure for Google at the time of the announcement. “Power purchase agreements help give wind farm developers like Eneco the economic certainty to invest in new renewable energy generation capacity, which is good for the environment — but also makes great financial sense for companies like Google.”

Image Credit: Sunport Delfzijl (copyright Eemsdeltadrones)

Fast-forward nearly three years and Google and Eneco have teamed up again in the same region, but this time, instead of a PPA for electricity from a Delfzijl wind farm, this time Google will purchase all the electricity from a new Delfzijl solar park, the largest in the country, which will provide 27 Gigawatt-hours of electricity to Google’s new data center. Both the solar park and the new data center are located at Groningen Seaports in the Delfzijl port area, and the 30 megawatt (MW) Sunpower Delfzijl solar park has been operational since the beginning of this year.

“Google is forward-thinking to use locally generated solar and wind energy to power its data centre,” said Bram Poeth, director of Eneco Commercial Clients. “Google leads the way in providing a good example for the commercial sector, where we see a strong growth of the demand for sustainable energy. We are proud that we are able to contribute to making this possible. It is completely in line with our aim to connect our customers directly to local sustainable sources.”

“We are proud that our data centre in the Eemshaven has been powered by renewable energy since day one thanks to our agreements with Dutch suppliers,” added Marc Oman, EU Energy Lead at Google.

“After the agreement with Eneco for the delivery of wind energy from WindPark Delfzijl and the agreements with the wind parks Krammer and Bouwdokken, we are pleased that we can now also make use of solar energy. Worldwide, we have already contracted the delivery of 2.7 GW of green electricity, which makes Google the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy. Contracts like this give companies like Eneco the economic certainty to invest in new renewable energy capacity.”


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Joshua S Hill

I'm a Christian, a nerd, a geek, and I believe that we're pretty quickly directing planet-Earth into hell in a handbasket! I also write for Fantasy Book Review (.co.uk), and can be found writing articles for a variety of other sites. Check me out at about.me for more.

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