Facebook has inked its first deal to buy Mumbai-based CleanMax’s 32-megawatt wind power project in India. The social media giant’s move to work on solar and wind renewable energy projects was accomplished on Thursday, as it bought a stake into supplying renewable power into the country’s electrical grid.
As part of the agreement, the two companies have clarified in an official statement that CleanMax will own and operate the projects while Facebook will invest on the power grid using environmental attribute certificates or carbon credits.
Urvi Parekh, Facebook’s head of renewable energy, told Reuters that the company will not be owning the power plants but will invest in long-term electricity purchasing agreements with the renewable power company.
“That enables the project to seek out the financing that it would need,” she said. Furthermore, the electricity produced from these plants will power Facebook’s first Asian data centre that is set to begin operations next year, she explained.
Facebook has already inked similar deals with energy suppliers such as Sunseap Group, Sembcorp Industries and Terrenus Energy on projects that are capable of producing 160MW of solar power, Parekh said.
It is touted that these tech data centres consume as much as 1 percent of the world’s total energy, according to the International Energy Agency report of 2020.
With the demand for data and digital services growing manifold, tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet Inc have promised to adopt carbon-free footprint for their data centres and thereby accomplish net-zero emission standards with renewable energy.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced in a separate statement that the company has seen success in adopting renewable energy with net-zero emissions for all of its global operations.
(Source: Reuters)
