BT has signed a new power purchase agreement (PPA) with a Scottish wind farm to purchase 100GWh of clean electricity each year over 15 years.
The deal with the 13-turbine site at Stroupster in the far North of Scotland is worth £185 million and is the fourth PPA with a UK wind farm signed by BT to help power the country’s demand for digital services.
The latest PPA will help the telecoms giant continue to be powered entirelt by renewables in the UK, which it has done since 2012. BT consumes around 2.5 TWh each year and combined with EE, it uses around 1% of the UK’s energy to power its networks, data centres and offices, spending around £350 million per year on energy and fuel.
Rob Williams, BT’s general manager of power procurement, said: “BT is a green energy pioneer and we have been purchasing 100% renewable energy in the UK since 2012. By 2020 we aim to be purchasing 100% renewable electricity worldwide, so soon all of our power will come from sources such as sunlight, wind, rain, tides, waves and geothermal heat wherever we operate across the globe – where markets allow.
“We hope our commitment to renewable energy will encourage more consumers and businesses to make the move towards renewable energy.”
In addition to greening its energy supply, BT has reduced its emissions from its operations every year since 2008 while working to reduce its energy consumption.
The deal was welcomed by Scottish Renewables director of policy, Jenny Hogan, who commented: “The fact that we’re seeing more and more large companies like BT contracting most or all of their power from sources like wind, solar, hydro and biomass shows that renewable energy makes good business sense.
“It’s great to see firms like BT grasp this opportunity to cut carbon and stabilise their energy costs.”
A number of RE100 firms have adopted a similar strategy of purchasing clean energy from renewable sources rather than building their own generation assets. Google, the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy, is expecting all of its global operations to run on renewables this year.
Speaking in Brussels earlier this year at an event organised with The Climate Group, the organisation behind the RE100, Google’s director of global infrastructure Francois Sterin explained that the company currently seeks to buy what it consumes on a yearly basis but has greater plans for the future.
“We feel we need to do a little bit more than this and our goal is to be 24/7 zero carbon. We think with a combination of new technologies like storage for instance and ways to optimise systems like machine learning, we think we’ll be able to achieve that goal,” he said.
He also said that PPAs signed by the likes of Google and BT provide additional renewable capacity despite not developing generation themselves as these projects would often not go ahead without the corporate offtaker committing to purchase the output.
