On June 15, 2022, Silicon Valley Clean Energy (SVCE) and Google announced that they have completed an agreement to create a fundamentally new 24/7 renewable energy service that features hourly renewable energy matching, integrated demand management, and a commitment to ongoing community investments in local building and transportation electrification. Under the 10-year agreement, SVCE will serve Google’s offices in Mountain View and Sunnyvale, matching carbon-free electricity with Google’s local demand for at least 92 percent of all hours in the year. Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati advised SVCE on the transaction, along with co-counsel at Keyes & Fox LLP.

This precedent-setting step showcases the way in which California community choice aggregators can collaborate with motivated customers to achieve a decarbonized electric supply. The new service creates a Carbon-Free Energy (CFE) measure—a 24/7 “CFE Score.” SVCE has incorporated this measure into a commercial energy service for Google, to build and manage an optimized portfolio of complementary clean resources designed to match Google’s local energy demand across all hours of the year, including wind, solar, geothermal, battery energy storage systems, and other resources. In addition, the service supports dynamic management of demand from Google’s growing all-electric building and transportation infrastructure, essential for large-scale carbon reduction in the community. Google’s innovative all-electric building systems, including thermal and electric storage, and electric vehicle charging infrastructure, can be flexed to use energy when it is cleanest and lowest-cost, and further improve 24/7 CFE performance.

SVCE and Google share common goals for carbon-free electricity and reducing fossil fuel use in buildings and transportation. SVCE is a public, community-choice energy agency formed in 2016 by 13 local jurisdictions to provide carbon-free electricity at competitive rates and electrification programs to further reduce community-wide carbon emissions. Google is a longtime corporate leader in renewable energy procurement, committed to operating its business on carbon-free energy—at all hours and in every location by 2030.

Wilson Sonsini was honored to assist in the creation of this new, carbon-free energy product and hopes—along with SVCE and Google—that the success of this transaction will serve as a model for other suppliers and customers.

For more information, please see SVCE’s news release.