DELFZIJL,
07
July
2017
|
09:15
Europe/Amsterdam

Electricity from largest Dutch solar park to power local Google data centre

27 Gigawatt hours of green electricity to power data centre in Eemshaven

Summary

Today, Google and Eneco announced that Google will purchase all of the green electricity generated by Sunport Delfzijl, the largest solar energy park in the Netherlands, for a period of ten years. The agreement with Eneco is Google's fourth investment in sustainable energy in the Netherlands and the second agreement between Eneco and Google. The electricity generated by the solar park will help offset the energy consumption of Google’s data centre located twenty kilometres further up in the Eemshaven. 

Sunport: 30 hectares of solar panels
The solar park in Delfzijl contains around 123,000 solar panels on a terrain of 30 hectares (which equals about 65 soccer fields) and is expected to deliver approximately 27 Gigawatt Hours of green electricity. The data centre and the solar park are both located on the terrain of Groningen Seaports in the Delfzijl port area. Sunport Delfzijl is operational since the beginning of 2017. Sunport was developed and built by the German energy company Wirsol.

'Google is forward-thinking to use locally generated solar and wind energy to power its data centre”, Bram Poeth, director of Eneco Commercial Clients, comments enthusiastically. “Google leads the way in providing a good example for the commercial sector, where we see a strong growth of the demand for sustainable energy. We are proud that we are able to contribute to making this possible. It is completely in line with our aim to connect our customers directly to local sustainable sources.'

A second sustainable energy agreement with Google
Marc Oman, EU Energy Lead at Google: 'We are proud that our data centre in the Eemshaven has been powered by renewable energy since day one thanks to our agreements with Dutch suppliers. After the agreement with Eneco for the delivery of wind energy from WindPark Delfzijl and the agreements with the wind parks Krammer and Bouwdokken, we are pleased that we can now also make use of solar energy. Worldwide, we have already contracted the delivery of 2.7 GW of green electricity, which makes Google the world's largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy. Contracts like this give companies like Eneco the economic certainty to invest in new renewable energy capacity.'

Photo: sunport Delfzijl (copyright Eemsdeltadrones)

Boilerplate

About Google
Google's mission is to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. With products and platforms such as Search, Maps, Gmail, Android, Google Play, YouTube and Chrome, Google plays an important role in the daily lives of billions of people and has become one of the most well-known companies in the world. Google is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.

Google is a brand name of Google Inc. All other company and product names can be brand names of related companies with which it is affiliated. For more information about Google's investments in and use of renewable energy see: www.google.com/green/energy/.

About Eneco Group
Eneco Group is a group of companies active internationally in the area of sustainable energy and innovation. Together with our customers, partners and 3,500 employees, we seek to fulfil our mission: sustainable energy for everyone. We invest in wind parks, biomass power plants, thermal power plants and solar parks in order to increase the sustainable energy supply. We develop innovative products and services so that our customers can determine how they wish to generate, store, use or share energy. www.enecogroup.com

Contact details for the media
Eneco Group – Arie Spruit, +31 (0)621879407 – arie.spruit@eneco.com
Google Benelux - Cindy Penders - +31 (0)654631880 - cpenders@google.com