Google, Microsoft, and Nucor Come Together in the Name of Clean Electricity

In a landmark collaboration, Google, Microsoft, and Nucor have announced a partnership to foster the development of advanced clean electricity technologies. This initiative aims to create new business models and consolidate their demand for innovative energy solutions, such as advanced nuclear, next-generation geothermal, clean hydrogen, and long-duration energy storage, among others.

The collaborative effort begins with a Request for Information (RFI) targeting potential projects across several U.S. regions that could benefit from offtake agreements. This move is designed to encourage participation from technology providers, developers, investors, utilities, and other stakeholders in the clean electricity domain.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) underscores the necessity of firm, dispatchable clean electricity technologies alongside advanced energy storage systems to achieve cost-effective grid decarbonization and meet the rising global demand for carbon-free energy. These technologies are pivotal in bridging the intermittency of wind and solar power, enhancing grid reliability, and reducing dependency on fossil fuel generation.

However, the path to commercializing these advanced technologies is fraught with challenges, largely due to the inherent risks and novelty associated with early-stage projects. By pooling their considerable demand, Google, Microsoft, and Nucor aim to mitigate these risks, encouraging utility and developer engagement in early commercial endeavors. This strategy is expected to facilitate the necessary investments, drive down technology costs through deployment repetition, and bring these innovative projects to fruition by the early 2030s.

The trio’s immediate focus is to validate the demand aggregation and procurement model via pilot projects within the United States. They plan to establish a project delivery framework concentrating on offtake agreements for emergent technologies, influencing policy through a unified customer perspective, and crafting novel tariff structures in collaboration with energy providers.

Beyond advancing decarbonization efforts, this demand aggregation approach offers tangible benefits to large energy consumers by enabling access to a diversified portfolio of carbon-free electricity, diminishing project-specific risks, and fostering procurement efficiency.