Google strikes massive deal to buy 1.5 terawatt hours of Ohio solar capacity — 15-year deal will see most of 50 megawatt solar farm's capacity diverted to data centers

Google has signed a deal with French oil and gas giant TotalEnergies to purchase 1.5 Terawatt hours of electricity from the as-yet-unfinished Montpelier solar farm over the next 15 years, the company announced. The 50 MW facility is nearing completion, but with this deal, it may end up sending the majority of its generated power to Google data centers, leaving little benefit to local communities - an all too common problem with recent data center infrastructure projects.

The Montpelier facility is located in Williams County, and is connected to the PJM grid system — the largest in the United States. When it comes online, it will have a maximum capacity of 50 megawatts, so if it were running at full capacity all day, every day, it would deliver a consistent 50 megawatt hours every hour. But this is solar, and it's Ohio, so it's not going to get close to that. Indeed, the EIA has Ohio's photovoltaic energy capacity factor at just 19.2%.

To do the math on that, with 8,760 hours in a year, a 50 megawatt capacity, and a 19.2% energy factor, the Montpelier solar farm is on track to deliver around 84,000 megawatt hours of electricity per year. Under the Google contract, it would need to deliver 100,000 megawatt hours per year to meet its obligations, suggesting that there is scope for further expansion of the site in the future.

This also doesn't account for maintenance schedules, panel efficiency degrading over time, or natural disasters and other unforeseen events interrupting supply.

This suggests that the majority of, if not all, of the power generated at this new solar facility will flow into Google's data centers. As these new massive facilities come online to power the tech world's obsession with AI, many energy-generating sites are being snapped up in order to supply these energy-hungry projects.

"We are delighted to strengthen our partnership with Google with this agreement to supply renewable electricity to their data centers in Ohio," said Stéphane Michel, President Gas, Renewables & Power at TotalEnergies. "This agreement illustrates TotalEnergies’s ability to meet the growing energy demands of major tech companies by leveraging its integrated portfolio of renewable and flexible assets."

This absorption of large energy-generating output is placing strains on grids and energy bills for consumers. There are also concerns over water contamination at data center construction sites, as well as extreme water usage by these facilities for cooling.

For the eco-conscious, however, it is at least encouraging that Google will use renewable energy for its projects rather than more gas turbines or importing a power plant. TotalEnergies is expanding its renewable investment in the US, despite the administration's active pushback against such technologies, and is deploying a total of 10 gigawatts of renewable solar and wind projects across the US, according to Reuters.

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