Google plants $100 million in giant wind farm
The Shepherds Flat wind farm is expected to be fully operational in 2012 and supply 235,000 average U.S. homes. — Google today said that it will invest about $100 million in the very large Shepherd's Flat wind project in Oregon …
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands eight days after Google put $168 million into a California solar power tower, making Shepherds Flat the second utility-scale generation bet Google has announced within a single month. The pattern is no longer ad hoc: the company is building a portfolio of direct stakes in large renewable projects rather than just buying offsets.
The scale of the Oregon project — expected fully operational in 2012 and sized to supply 235,000 average U.S. homes — puts a search company in the position of an institutional energy investor, alongside utilities and project-finance firms.
First-order effects
- Shepherds Flat gains a marquee $100 million backer at construction stage, de-risking financing for a project of a size that typically depends on a small pool of large investors.
Second-order effects
- Other large electricity consumers — data-center operators chief among them — face pressure to justify why their power procurement still runs through utilities and RECs rather than direct ownership stakes in new generation.
Third-order effects
- If hyperscale buyers keep stepping into project finance themselves, the boundary between corporate power purchaser and energy investor erodes, shifting part of the financing burden for utility-scale renewables onto technology balance sheets.
The trend: Major technology companies are moving from buying clean power to financing its construction, treating generation assets as a strategic hedge on data-center energy costs.