Google has announced on their blog site today that its data center in Finland will receive its power from a wind farm in Sweden.
A 10-year deal with Swedish wind farm developer O2 is the fourth long-term agreement—and the first in Europe—made by Google to power its data centers with renewable energy. O2 is building a wind farm in northern Sweden which will produce 72 megawatts (MW) of energy—all of it going to Google’s Finnish data center for 10 years.
The search giant’s agreement to buy all of the farm’s power cleared the path for financing the project through the investment arm of the German insurance company, Allianz, which will take over management of the facility when it is expected to come online in 2015.
Google explained that the deal was made possible by Scandinavia’s integrated electricity market, called Nord Pool. It allowed Google to buy power in one country and use it in another.
