Google has signed a deal with French oil and gas giant TotalEnergies to purchase 1.5 Terawatt hours of electricity from the as-yet-unfinished Montpelier solar farm over the next 15 years, the company announced. The 50 MW facility is nearing completion, but with this deal, it may end up sending the majority of its generated power to Google data centers, leaving little benefit to local communities - an all too common problem with recent data center infrastructure projects.
The Montpelier facility is located in Williams County, and is connected to the PJM grid system — the largest in the United States. When it comes online, it will have a maximum capacity of 50 megawatts, so if it were running at full capacity all day, every day, it would deliver a consistent 50 megawatt hours every hour. But this is solar, and it's Ohio, so it's not going to get close to that. Indeed, the EIA has Ohio's photovoltaic energy capacity factor at just 19.2%.
