The companies will work to address barriers to early-stage
commercial project deployment.
CHARLOTTE, N.C., March 19,
2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Google LLC, Microsoft
Corporation, and Nucor Corporation today announced they will work
together across the electricity ecosystem to develop new business
models and aggregate their demand for advanced clean electricity
technologies. These models will be designed to accelerate the
development of first-of-a-kind (FOAK) and early commercial
projects, including advanced nuclear, next-generation geothermal,
clean hydrogen, long-duration energy storage (LDES) and others. As
a first step, the companies will issue an RFI in several US regions
for potential projects in need of offtake, and encourage technology
providers, developers, investors, utilities and others interested
in responding to get in touch here.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), firm,
dispatchable clean electricity technologies and advanced energy
storage systems are needed to cost-effectively decarbonize
grids and help the world meet its growing electricity demand with
carbon-free energy sources. These advanced clean electricity
technologies can fill gaps in wind and solar production and
support grid reliability – needs that today are still being met by
fossil fuel generation.
Yet, these advanced clean electricity technologies face
challenges, in part because the novelty and risk of early projects
make it difficult to secure the financing they need. By developing
new commercial structures and aggregating demand from three of the
world's largest energy buyers, this approach aims to reduce the
risks for utilities and developers considering early commercial
projects and enable the investments that are needed - ultimately
helping to bring these projects online by the early 2030s and
reducing technology costs through repeated deployment.
The companies will initially focus on proving out the demand
aggregation and procurement model through advanced technology pilot
projects in the United States. The
companies will pilot a project delivery framework focused on three
enabling levers for early commercial projects: signing offtake
agreements for technologies that are still early on the cost curve,
bringing a clear customer voice to policymakers and other
stakeholders on broader long-term ecosystem improvements, and
developing new enabling tariff structures in partnership with
energy providers and utilities.
In addition to supporting innovative technologies that can help
decarbonize electricity systems worldwide, this demand aggregation
model will bring clear benefits to large energy buyers. Pooling
demand enables buyers to offtake larger volumes of carbon-free
electricity from a portfolio of plants, reducing project-specific
development risk, and enables procurement efficiencies and shared
learnings.
To ensure that the project delivery framework that they develop
is transparent and scalable, Google, Microsoft, and Nucor will
share their lessons learned and the roadmap from their first pilot
projects, and encourage other companies to consider how they can
also support advanced clean electricity projects.
About
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make
it universally accessible and useful. Through products and
platforms like Search, Maps, Gmail, Android, Google Play, Google
Cloud, Chrome and YouTube, Google plays a meaningful role in the
daily lives of billions of people and has become one of the most
widely known companies in the world. Google is a subsidiary of
Alphabet Inc.
Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT" @microsoft) enables digital
transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an
intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every
organization on the planet to achieve more.
Nucor Corporation is the largest steel and steel products
producer in North America and the
largest recycler of any material in the Western Hemisphere. For
more than five decades, Nucor has been built on the sustainable
model of producing steel with a low-carbon footprint by recycling
scrap metal into new steel and steel products through the use of
electric arc furnace technology. With its continued investment in
breakthrough technologies to lower emissions across the supply
chain, Nucor is committed to reshaping the industry by not only
making steel more sustainably but enabling partners to reach their
own carbon reduction goals.
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SOURCE Nucor Corporation