Under a new agreement with local utility Grand River Dam Authority (GRDA), Google will power its Oklahoma data center with 48 MW of wind energy from the Canadian Hills Wind Project, which is expected to come online later this year, the search-engine giant announced on its blog.
The project, which will have a total capacity of 300 MW, is being developed by Apex Wind Energy.
‘We've been working with GRDA, our local utility, to procure additional renewable energy since we plugged in our data center in 2011, and in February of 2012, GRDA approached us about purchasing power from Canadian Hills,’ Google explained.
In conjunction with the electricity GRDA already supplies Google to operate its data center, Google will pay the utility a premium to purchase renewable energy generated by the Canadian Hills project.
With this agreement, Google has signed contracts for over 260 MW of renewable energy.
