Advancing clean electricity on India’s grid

Google’s global value chain is complex, spanning a wide range of industries, geographies, and emissions sources. To make progress toward our moonshot of net-zero emissions across our operations and value chain, we identified clean electricity as a critical solution to scale – primarily in Asia Pacific, where many of our suppliers operate.

As a next step in advancing clean electricity in the region and making progress toward addressing our value chain emissions, we are partnering with ReNew Energy to enable a new, 150 megawatt (MW) solar project in Rajasthan, India. Under this long-term agreement, Google will receive the associated environmental attribute certificates (EACs) and allocate them to our scope 3 emissions. While we continue to engage key suppliers directly to increase adoption of clean energy, this agreement will help address those emissions that cannot be traced to a specific supplier.

This deal puts into practice the principles outlined in a recently released white paper and represents our first-of-its-kind implementation of this scope 3 framework. To ensure it drives responsible and meaningful impact, the agreement is centered on two critical characteristics: first, we are adding new clean energy to the grid by signing a long-term agreement that will enable investment in new generation capacity. And second, by focusing this in India, which has significant energy needs and a rapidly growing grid, we are directing capital where it can create high impact.

Our aim is for this to serve as a market catalyst, demonstrating a pathway for companies to credibly address value chain emissions even without full supply chain data transparency.

This new solar agreement builds on previously announced partnerships with energy developers to add 186 MW of wind and solar generation capacity across multiple states in India. These investments will help India continue its recent clean energy progress, including reaching 50% of installed electric power capacity from non-fossil fuel sources, and reflect Google’s commitment to advance and scale a diverse portfolio of carbon-free energy sources in India.