After Google announced the phase out of its RE<C initiative last month, some in the press drew the conclusion that the tech giant was pulling out of renewables altogether. We quickly pointed out that it was a simple shift in Google’s strategy — moving from R&D to deployment, where the company could make a bigger impact.
Well, here’s more evidence of Google’s flair for renewable energy deployment. Adding to the $850 million in clean energy deployment investments, Google is putting another $94 million into four solar photovoltaic projects representing 88 MW of capacity around California. The projects will be built by a leading North American developer Recurrent Energy.
(Here’s a little factoid about the relationship: Recurrent CEO Arno Harris is the former general manager of EI Solutions, the company that installed a 1.6 MW PV system on Google’s headquarters. That was back in 2007, when a 1.6 MW system was a huge deal. Now it’s a regular occurrence to quickly install PV projects with tens of MW of capacity.)
This latest round of solar investments brings Google’s total clean energy portfolio to $915 million. Electricity from these installations will be sold to the Sacramento Municipal Utility District under a Feed-in Tariff over a 20-year period. The global financial firm KKR will co-invest with Google in the projects.
This rounds out the year well for the U.S. solar market, which saw 140% growth in the third quarter of this year, bringing installs to over 1 GW.
