Google will cover all costs of the massive Pine Island BESS deployment under a new ‘clean energy agreement’, which could potentially become a model for data centre partnerships as various US states move towards a carbon-free future.

Xcel and Google are partnering to provide 1,900 MW of clean energy to the grid. The system is designed to ensure 100-hour long-duration energy storage (LDES), paired with 1,400 MW of wind and 200 MW of solar, under a $40mn investment – without impacting residential customers.

The system includes a 300 MW/30 GWh iron-air battery which will store energy during periods of high production and low demand, and dispatch clean power to the grid during times of high demand, ‘providing firm capacity and strengthening grid reliability’, says Form Energy.  

Technically, although lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries are effective for four-hour shifts of BESS, they cannot handle multi-day storage.

The iron-air battery is based on the principle of ‘reversible rusting’ and is composed of cells packed with thousands of iron pellets. When exposed to air, they rust. When oxygen is removed, the rust reverts to iron. Under careful control of the electrolysis process, the battery is charged and discharged.

The iron-air BESS is less energy-dense than Li-ion counterparts, making it compatible with large grid-scale applications. The individual battery module measures about the size of a washer/dryer set and is stacked in 50 one-metre-tall cells. The cells consist of iron and air electrodes which are contained in a water-based, non-flammable electrolyte.  

The battery modules will be grouped in modular MW-scale power blocks, which are connected to the grid. A 1 MW system covers about half an acre of land. A higher-density configuration could achieve over 3 MW/acre. The iron-air batteries will be built at the Form Factory 1 in Weirton, West Virginia, with plans to scale-up towards 500 MW of annual production capacity.

Form Energy claims that the iron-air battery is capable of storing energy at ‘less than one tenth the cost of Li-ion technology’; while eliminating the risk of thermal runaway, or heavy metals, and allowing utility operators to meet power demand with stored energy over time horizons which were previously not achievable.

Google has also just signed a power purchase agreement (PPA) for 1GW of solar power with TotalEnergies and US utility AES, to power its data centre operations in Texas.

Hyperscalers diverge from general buyers in clean energy purchase deals

In other news, BloombergNEF (BNEF) analysis shows that the market is increasingly defined by a divergence between so called ‘hyperscalers’ and general corporate buyers. Big Tech features high in the race for new PPAs, led by the likes of Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft, which were responsible for 49% of all global activity in this area last year. Meta and Amazon led the clean energy buying activity in 2025, contracting 20.4 GW combined, including 4.7 GW of nuclear power. While Meta’s clean energy buying activity was mainly focused in the US, Amazon was the most active buyer in Europe and Asia-Pacific.  

The report found that global clean PPA deal volumes fell last year for the first time since 2015. The market analyst suggests that ‘power prices and policy risks redefined the market’.

Corporations announced deals for 55.9 GW of clean power in 2025, 10% down from the record the previous year, according to the 1H2026 Corporate Energy Market Outlook from BNEF.

The US hosted 25.9 GW of deals, driven by Big Tech, with a pivot towards nuclear, hydro and geothermal. Large technology firms signed most of the deals, while smaller players became less active as project costs rose, along with concerns about Trump Administration policy uncertainty. The number of ‘unique’ corporate buyers in the US fell 51% year-on-year to just 33.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the Middle East and Africa region, corporate PPA volumes fell 13% year-on-year in 2025, to 17 GW. BNEF attributes the fall-back to ‘rapidly increasing hours of negative power prices, which eroded the value of standalone solar and wind deals, pushing buyers towards hybrid portfolios’.

In the Asia-Pacific, PPA deal volumes fell to 6.9 GW from 10.7 GW in the previous year, primarily due to slowdowns in India and South Korea.  

BNEF energy analyst Nayel Brihi says: ‘Corporate clean energy buyers are operating at two different speeds. Large tech buyers are venturing into bigger deals and frontier technologies [like small modular reactors], while smaller companies are grappling with power market realities… For the market to return to growth, we will need to see clean, firm power supply options such as co-located solar and storage delivering at scale, and at competitive prices.’

On the supply side, Engie emerged as the top developer, contracting 3.6 GW globally, followed by AES, Iberdrola, Invergy and Talen Energy. Seven of the top 10 sellers offered clean, firm power contracts including co-located solar and storage, hybrid solar and wind, or nuclear PPAs – accounting for 5.2 GW of baseload activity.

BNEF said the push for more sophisticated corporate clean energy deals is also being driven by regulatory shifts – like the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, as a global standard for corporate carbon accounting, which is updating Scope 2 emissions standards. Corporate clean energy buyers are preparing for this change, with 5.8 GW of co-located and hybrid deals tracked by BNEF in 2025. Furthermore, as battery costs continue to decline, these deal structures are expected to become the new standard for corporate procurement.

For more details from the 1H2026 Corporate Energy Market Outlook, visit https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-energy/bloombergnef-finds-global-energy-transition-investment-reached-record-2-3-trillion-in-2025-up-8-from-2024/