Google has purchased a stake in New Green Power (NGP), a Taiwanese solar developer which is currently owned by investment firm BlackRock.

The partnership with BlackRock’s Climate Infrastructure business will help support the development of a 1 gigawatt (GW) pipeline of new solar capacity in Taiwan which will Google says will produce clean energy on the local electricity grid.

The investment in NGP will fund new solar project and Google expects to procure around 300 MW of solar energy from the pipeline through power purchase agreements (PPAs( to meet electricity demand from its data centre campus, cloud region and office operations in Taiwan.

Google currently has a goal to reach net-zero emissions across all its operations and value chain by 2030. Taiwan currently relies on fossil fuels to generate around 85 per cent of its power.

The deal is subject to regulatory approval and Google did not disclose the terms of the investment.

“Companies can play a pivotal role in finding new strategies to grow the supply of available renewable energy sources and promoting emerging technologies that enable the full decarbonisation of regional electricity systems,” said Amanda Peterson Corio, global head of data centre energy at Google. “This partnership is an important milestone in our net-zero and carbon-free journey, and there is much more to be done both in Asia Pacific and around the world”

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