To help Facebook reach sustainability goals in the region.
One of Singapore’s solar energy company, Sunseap Group will supply Facebook with renewable energy to support the tech company’s operations in Singapore. This will include one of Facebook’s first custom-built data centre in Asia.
The transaction with Sunseap will help Facebook—one of the largest corporate purchasers of renewable energy globally—reach its goal of supporting its operations in the region with 100 per cent renewable energy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 75 per cent.
The power purchase agreement (VPPA) is a contract structure in which a power buyer agrees to purchase a project’s renewable energy for a pre-agreed price.
The energy can be produced from a renewable energy project that is located away from a company’s premises but co-located on the same grid.
In this case, the renewable energy credits (RECs) that Facebook will receive will come from electricity produced from solar panels exported from Sunseap’s solar projects located on the rooftops of 1,200 public housing residential blocks and 49 government buildings across Singapore.
It is expected that these rooftops could total 100MWp of solar capacity when fully completed in 2022, said Lawrence Wu, president and executive director at Sunseap Group.
“We believe VPPA is the way to go for enterprises as they accelerate efforts to add renewables to their energy mix,” he said. “This is a game-changer in Asia’s drive to decarbonise and fight climate change.”
Urvi Parekh, head of renewable energy at Facebook said the project will be an “important part of successfully reaching” its “targets in the region”. This includes supporting data centre operations with renewable energy.
Facebook designs, builds and operates some of the most efficient data centre facilities in the world. Facebook has contracted for more than 5.4 gigawatts of new renewable energy in support of its global operations. This agreement will also support Facebook’s offices in the region, said Parekh.
Sunseap is one of the largest developers in the region with a total contracted, completed, and developmental asset project capacity of 1.7 GigaWatt-peak across Asia Pacific.
It has a pipeline of projects in Australia, China, Taiwan, Japan and other parts of Southeast Asia, and successfully commissioned a 168 MWp solar farm in the Ninh Thuan province of Vietnam.
