By Simon Jessop and Susanna Twidale
LONDON (Reuters) – Google said it has taken a stake in Taiwan’s New Green Power and could buy up to 300 megawatts of renewable energy from the BlackRock fund-owned company to reduce the company’s carbon emissions and those from suppliers to help reduce this.
Companies are being pressured by investors to reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with their operations and value chains, and Big Tech companies are among the most ambitious in their targets.
Google aims to run on carbon-free energy wherever it operates, all the time. Yet sectoral growth in demand for data processing capacity to power artificial intelligence has seen emissions rise.
Taiwan, a key site for Google’s cloud technology with a data center and corporate offices, still relied on fossil fuels to generate nearly 85% of its energy, Amanda Peterson Corio, Google’s Global Head of Data Center Energy, told Reuters.
“The purpose of this investment is actually to support the construction of a large-scale solar pipeline in Taiwan,” Corio added.
Regions such as Asia Pacific are more difficult to decarbonize due to less developed infrastructure and restrictions that limit the ability of business users to purchase green energy.
New Green Power, owned by a fund managed by BlackRock’s Climate Infrastructure business, was one of the leading solar developers and operators in Taiwan, BlackRock’s Global Head of Climate Infrastructure David Giordano told Reuters.
Neither Google nor BlackRock would provide details on the size of the equity stake being taken in NGP, but Corio said the investment is expected to fuel equity and debt financing for the build-out of the 1 gigawatt (GW) pipeline.
Taiwan is targeting 20 GW of solar capacity by 2025 and up to 80 GW by 2050, BlackRock said.
Corio said that in addition to using some of the solar energy it buys for its own operations, Google could also offer some of it to its suppliers and manufacturers in the region.
By sharing data with suppliers, Google could reduce its so-called Scope 3 emissions, those associated with its value chain, she added.
(Editing by Alexander Smith)
