SAN JOSE — Silicon Valley’s embrace of renewable energy continued Tuesday with an announcement by Cisco Systems of a 20-year solar deal that will help power its headquarters.
Cisco has agreed to buy the output of a solar farm NRG Renew will build on 153 acres in Blythe near the California-Arizona border.
NRG Renew will pump the electricity into California’s grid, from which Cisco will withdraw an equal amount of “green” power in San Jose.
The latest Cisco deal requires little upfront money from the San Jose networking colossus and will lower its energy bill while adding to the amount of solar energy consumed statewide. Power from the deal will start flowing to Cisco at the end of 2016.
Ali Ahmed, Cisco’s global energy and sustainability chief, said the plan will further Cisco’s goal of using renewable sources for at least 25 percent of its needs every year from 2012 to 2017.
“Our campus in San Jose doesn’t have a lot of space and our rooftops are full with cooling equipment for our labs and data centers,” he said. “There’s not a lot of opportunity to do onsite solar. This allows us to realize our energy goals without having to become a landowner.”
The new solar farm will supply about 8 percent of the Cisco campus’s electrical power, but it is peak power produced during the day when the state’s power grid is the most stressed, Ahmed said.
Cisco’s roughly 16,000 employees work out of 43 buildings in Silicon Valley covering about 7 million square feet of space, according to the company.
The new solar farm is one of several solar projects NRG Renew has in California, according to CEO Tom Doyle. The company is working on deals with a water service company and another “Cisco-like company,” he said.
Silicon Valley tech companies — especially those with big, power-hungry labs and data centers — have embraced green energy in the past few years, Cisco among them. Apple recently announced plans to power its Cupertino headquarters building, now under construction, with solar energy from a project operated by First Solar in a remote part of Monterey County near Cholame. Google signed a 20-year agreement with Florida-based NextEra to buy nearly 43 megawatts of electricity from an Altamont Pass wind farm beginning next year.
Intel recently grabbed attention with a mini-wind farm on top of its Santa Clara headquarters building.
Cisco already has about 2 megawatts of solar power for some of its facilities around the U.S., including a new system in Boxborough, Massachusetts. The company said it is focusing on its engineering labs, which Ahmed said are Cisco’s largest consumers of energy and greatest source of greenhouse gas emissions.
NRG said its Blythe II solar farm is in a location where average temperatures are 90 degrees or higher. The new 20 megawatt project will provide enough electricity to power 14,000 homes and reduce a greenhouse gas equivalent to removing 21,000 cars from the road.
NRG is a major independent power producer with about 3 million retail customers nationwide.
Contact Pete Carey at 408-920-5419. Follow him on Twitter.com/petecarey.
