Amanda Peterson Corio, Global Head of Data Center Energy, Google, on a new partnership with BlackRock’s Climate Infrastructure business adding solar capacity to the Taiwan electricity grid.
We have a bold goal to reach net-zero emissions across all our operations and value chain by 2030, supported by a goal to run on 24/7 carbon-free energy on every grid where we operate.
A partnership with BlackRock’s Climate Infrastructure business will help support the development of a 1 gigawatt (GW) pipeline of new solar capacity in Taiwan – advancing clean energy on the local electricity grid and our own 24/7 carbon-free goal.
As part of our partnership, we’re making a capital investment in New Green Power (NGP), a Taiwanese solar developer and BlackRock portfolio company, to facilitate the buildout of its large-scale solar pipeline. Fossil fuels generate nearly 85% of Taiwan’s electricity.
Companies can play a pivotal role in finding new strategies to grow the supply of available renewable energy sources and promoting emerging technologies that enable the full decarbonization of regional electricity systems. Our investment in NGP, subject to regulatory approval, will serve as development capital toward its 1 GW pipeline of new solar projects, catalyzing critical equity and debt financing for those projects.
We expect to procure up to 300 MW of solar energy from this pipeline through power purchase agreements (PPAs) and the associated energy attribute certificates (Taiwan Renewable Energy Certificates or T-RECs) to help meet electricity demand from our data center campus, cloud region and office operations in Taiwan. We may offer a portion of this clean energy capacity to our semiconductor suppliers and manufacturers in the region so they can advance their own sustainability goals while helping us reduce our Scope 3 emissions (the indirect emissions from our value chain).
A significant share of our Scope 3 footprint can be traced back to the electricity grids that power our suppliers and users, which is why broad decarbonization — and partnerships like this — continue to be core to our net-zero goal. The partnership builds on more than five years of collaboration to accelerate the clean energy transition through market and policy development across Asia Pacific.
Our advocacy and engagement efforts were a key driver of the 2017 amendment of Taiwan’s Electricity Act, which opened up the market to allow non-utility companies to directly purchase renewable energy.
This work led to us becoming the first corporate buyer to sign a PPA in the market.
Since then, Taiwan has achieved a significant cumulative contracted capacity through corporate PPAs, becoming one of the leading corporate PPA markets in the APAC region.
We’re a founding member of the Asia Clean Energy Coalition (ACEC), which brings together energy buyers, suppliers and policymakers to help improve the policy and regulatory environment for corporate renewable electricity purchasing.
Coalitions like ACEC are essential to drive the system-level transformation required for a carbon-free future in APAC.
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