Google said it will invest about $150m in renewable energy projects that can help to green its manufacturing base.
The web giant said the investments to be made alongside partners aim to spur $1.5bn of capital for renewables projects “in key manufacturing regions”, which it did not specify.
“With these investments, we expect to help generate renewable energy that is equivalent to the amount of electricity used to manufacture our Google consumer hardware products,” it said in a statement.
Google has been invited by Recharge to give further details of the investment plan, which comes soon after a senior Google executive said tech companies were in a type of “arms race” to buy renewable power, and Microsoft revealed to Recharge that it may add project stake ownership to its clean energy strategy.
Along with technology giants such as Apple and Facebook, Google has been a key player in the emerging corporate renewable energy market, but in recent years mainly through striking deals for wind and solar output to green supplies to its data centres, rather than as a part-owner of projects themselves.
Google’s last high-profile announcement of plans to become a partner in a renewable energy project was its 2015 “pledge” to buy Vestas’ 12.5% share in sub-Saharan Africa’s largest wind farm, the 310MW Lake Turkana in Kenya. As Recharge reported earlier this year that purchase has yet to be completed for reasons Google has declined to explain.
