Google and Eneco announced that Google will purchase all of the green electricity generated by Sunport Delfzijl, the largest solar energy park in the Netherlands, for a period of ten years. The agreement with Eneco is Google’s fourth investment in sustainable energy in the Netherlands and the second agreement between Eneco and Google. The electricity generated by the solar park will help offset the energy consumption of Google’s data centre located twenty kilometres further up in the Eemshaven.
Sunport: 30 hectares of solar panels
The solar park in Delfzijl contains around 123,000 solar panels on a terrain of 30 hectares (which equals about 65 football fields) and is expected to deliver approximately 27 Gigawatt Hours of green electricity. The data centre and the solar park are both located on the terrain of Groningen Seaports in the Delfzijl port area. Sunport Delfzijl has been operational since the beginning of 2017. Sunport was developed and built by the German energy company Wirsol.
“Google is forward-thinking to use locally generated solar and wind energy to power its data centre”, Bram Poeth, director of Eneco Commercial Clients, comments enthusiastically. “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.’
A second sustainable energy agreement with Google
Marc Oman, EU Energy Lead at Google: ‘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. 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.’
