Meta has signed a new Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) to procure energy from a solar farm in Texas.
Avangrid this week announced it had signed a deal with Meta that will see the social network company offtake from the 240MW True North solar farm currently in development in Falls County, Texas.
“We are proud to sign this agreement with a partner like Meta who, like us at Avangrid, has a strong commitment to accelerating the energy transition in the US,” said Pedro Azagra, Avangrid’s CEO. “With projects like True North, we continue our mission of helping the country meet its ambitious clean energy goals, while also creating quality jobs and strengthening our local economies.”
True North is Avangrid’s first solar farm in Texas and is expected to launch by early 2025. Part of Iberdrola, the company has 8.6GW of installed renewable capacity, including 1.1GW of solar projects, operating and under construction. It has a pipeline of more than 25GW under development, encompassing solar, onshore wind, offshore wind, and battery energy storage.
“We’re excited to expand our partnership with Avangrid to help bring new solar energy to support our local operations in Texas,” said Urvi Parekh, head of renewable energy at Meta. “True North will support our commitment to 100 percent renewable energy and represents additional investment and jobs for the region.”
Meta is a major purchaser of PPAs. In recent months the company has signed solar PPAs with BP and DESRI, and previously signed PPAs in Texas with EDP Renewables.
Meta currently operates one data center campus in Texas, in Fort Worth; the company broke ground on the 2.6 million sq ft facility in 2015, and brought it online in 2017.
In March 2022 the company announced plans for a second data center in the state, located in Temple. Falls County, where the True North solar farm is located, is adjacent to the city of Temple and Bell County.
However, the Temple location was one of the sites paused amid a company-wide ‘rescoping’ of data center projects to accommodate AI workloads. With construction beginning in the spring of 2022, the Temple data center was set to span 900,000 square feet (83,600 sqm), with construction beginning in the spring of 2022.