Microsoft has signed a large renewable energy deal in India.
Indian renewable energy firm ReNew this week announced the signing of a green attribute sale contract of 437.6MW with Microsoft.
ReNew said this is amongst India's largest corporate renewable agreements. Details of what assets Microsoft would be offtaking from were not shared.
Puneet Chandok, president, Microsoft India & South Asia said: “Microsoft has ambitious renewable energy and decarbonization goals. This agreement with ReNew accelerates our progress towards these goals while benefiting local communities through initiatives such as rural electrification and initiatives to improve women’s livelihoods. We are taking a holistic approach that includes progressing our climate goals and empowering the ecosystem with the technology that is needed to build a more resilient future.”
As part of the agreement, ReNew will direct approximately $15 million of revenue from the contract towards a community fund to support environmental justice initiatives focusing on women’s livelihoods and economic empowerment, energy access, rural electrification, environmental remediation, and water quality improvement.
“This is a significant milestone in ReNew’s journey to support the global decarbonization goals of governments and corporates. We are thrilled with this signing, as both companies have shared ambitions towards carbon neutrality,” added Sumant Sinha, founder, chairman, and CEO of ReNew. “As a sustainability-first organization, a just energy transition is integral to ReNew’s mission of creating a better world. This agreement will help us fulfil our commitment to the communities we operate amidst and address some of the socio-economic aspects related to climate change.”
Founded in 2011, ReNew (formerly Renew Power) has a contracted energy portfolio of ~15.6 GW in wind and solar projects, and is one of the largest renewable energy firms in India. It has previously signed an energy deal with RackBank.
This is the second deal between Microsoft and ReNew. The companies signed a 150MW deal in December 2022 to see the cloud company offtake from a solar site near Bikaner. Microsoft has also previously signed PPAs in India with Atria Power and Amplus Solar.
Microsoft has more than 5GW of data center capacity in operation and expects to add 1GW of server power over the next six months, followed by 1.5GW of new data center capacity in the first half of 2025.
The company is already one of the world’s largest corporate buyers of renewable energy, and in a job posting said it has more than 20GW of renewable energy under contract. The company has since told DCD it has brought 34GW of capacity to the grid.
Microsoft recently signed a major renewable energy framework deal with Brookfield to invest an estimated $10 billion in renewable electricity projects to be developed by Brookfield Asset Management.
2024 has seen the company sign PPAs in Ohio, Ireland, and France, as well as two PPAs in Texas totaling more than 800MW with Leeward Renewable Energy and RWE. It has also signed a 500MW distributed solar deal across the US with Pivot, and signed wind and solar deals in Europe with Repsol and European Energy.
It recently put out a PPA request for innovative energy technologies alongside Google and Nucor, and made multiple carbon capture and removal investments this year.
Microsoft opened three Indian cloud regions in Pune (Central India), Chennai (South India), and Mumbai (West India) in 2015. The company has since delisted its Mumbai region; it may have been converted into a reserved access region. The company is planning another region in Hyderabad.
