Google says it is tackling the challenge of powering its hyperscale data centers with a new partnership aimed at ensuring that when future centers come online, they will be co-located with the carbon-free power they need. 

The tech giant announced the “strategic partnership” with renewable energy developer Intersect Power and clean energy investor TPG Rise Climate on Dec. 10. The three companies plan to “develop industrial parks with gigawatts of data center capacity in the U.S., co-located with new clean energy plants to power them,” according to Google’s announcement. 

The first phase of the partnership’s first project is expected to go online in 2026 and be fully completed by 2027, said Ruth Porat, president and chief investment officer of Google and its parent company Alphabet. Responding to a NetZero Insider query, a Google spokesperson said no further details on the project are being released at this time.  

To launch the partnership, Google and TPG Rise Climate are lead investors in an $800 million round of funding, and they expect to attract up to $20 billion in infrastructure investments by the end of the decade, according to Intersect Power’s announcement.

“This model is a great opportunity to apply private capital to the tight coupling of load growth with new clean energy in markets across the U.S., and ultimately globally,” Porat says in a blog post on the Google website. “This ‘power first’ approach to data center development is an evolved model that can significantly reduce delivery timelines of new power generation and the projects that will use it — and is designed to ease grid burden and improve overall reliability and affordability for all energy customers.” 

The clean energy projects will be “purpose-built and right-sized” for individual data centers, Porat said. Google will be an anchor off-taker for Intersect’s co-located projects. “Once built, this means the Google data center would come online alongside its own clean power,” Porat said. 

Sheldon Kimber, CEO and founder of Intersect Power, called the partnership “an evolution of the way hyperscalers and power providers have previously worked together. We can and are developing innovative solutions to expand data center capacity while reducing the strain on the grid. Deep, collaborative partnerships combined with creative problem-solving are the only way that we can meet the explosion of AI growth, as well as society’s accelerating electricity demand.” 

Intersect currently has 2.2 GW of solar and 2.4 GWh of storage in operation or under construction, primarily in California and Texas, according to the company website. An additional other 4 GW of solar and 10 GWh of storage are expected to break ground in 2025.  

The company often co-locates its projects with an industrial off-taker, such as a data center,; so, they do not add major demand to regional distribution or transmission lines, according to a company spokesperson. 

“By aligning capital, innovation, and ambition, we expect this partnership to achieve unprecedented scale at our first co-located project, and we have set ourselves on a course to deliver several more large-scale, co-located data centers and clean energy power plants across the U.S.,” said Ed Beckley, a managing partner of TPG Rise Climate. 

Power Demand Doubles

Google’s latest partnership comes as predictions of demand growth connected to AI and data centers continue to spike. Industry consultant Grid Strategies released a new report Dec. 5, with a 15.8% increase in demand forecast for 2029. 

The new figure represents an 11% increase from the organization’s previous five-year prediction, made about a year ago. (See Grid Strategies’ 5-year Demand Growth Forecast Rises.) 

“Power demand had doubled last year from the prior year; lo and behold, it has doubled again,” Rob Gramlich, Grid Strategies president, told reporters during a press briefing. 

The increase in power demand has put pressure on companies like Google that have committed to cutting their greenhouse gas emissions. In its most recent sustainability report, the company said it posted a 13% year-over-year increase in GHG emissions in 2023, driven primarily by its supply chains and the voracious power demands of its artificial intelligence data centers. 

The company’s 2023 emissions totaled the equivalent of 14.3 million tons of carbon dioxide, up a 48% increase over its 2019 base year, and the report says Google expects further increases “before dropping to our absolute emission reduction target” — net zero by 2030. (See Google: AI, Data Centers Drive 13% Rise in GHG Emissions.) 

Some utilities have responded to the increased demand by planning new natural gas facilities. But Google and other hyperscalers, such as Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, are pursuing a range of partnerships and agreements aimed at procuring increasing amounts of clean energy and cutting the environmental impacts of their data centers. 

In a Dec. 9 blog post, Microsoft touted a new data center design that uses no water for cooling its servers, which will save 125 million liters of water per year per data center. The company has pledged that by 2030 its data centers will be carbon-negative and water-positive and produce zero waste. 

In October, Google signed an agreement with Kairos Power, a developer of small modular reactors, to purchase power from multiple SMRs, with the goal of developing a 500– MW fleet by 2035, according to the Kairos announcement. The Kairos SMRs are deployed in pairs totaling 150 MW, or 75 MW each. (See Google, Kairos Sign 500-MW Nuclear PPA.) 

Amazon leads a $500 million investment in X-energy, another SMR developer, with the goal of bringing 5 GW of new clean, dispatchable power online by 2039, according to an X-energy announcement. 

At the same time, co-location of data centers and existing nuclear plants has become a sensitive issue as utilities and grid operators have raised concerns about the impact on grid reliability. Amazon’s purchase of a data center co-located with Talen Energy’s Susquehanna nuclear plant in Pennsylvania sparked objections from American Electric Power and Exelon.  

FERC held a technical conference on co-location Nov. 1 and recently rejected Talen’s proposal to increase the amount of power the data center could take from the nuclear plant from 300 MW to 480 MW. (See FERC Rejects Expansion of Co-located Data Center at Susquehanna Nuclear Plant.)