Digital Realty is beefing up its renewable energy usage in Dallas, Texas via a long-term agreement for solar power. Digital Realty is purchasing solar power for the company's Dallas-area data center portfolio from Pattern Energy's 82.5 MWac Phoenix Solar Project, which is located in Fannin County, Texas.
Digital Realty is under contract for 78% of the project's total capacity, approximately 65 MWac, with the remainder held by Pattern Energy Group LP, the project developer and owner.
With the addition of the new solar project, Digital Realty's entire Dallas portfolio will be powered by 70% renewable energy once the Phoenix Solar project reaches commercial operation by the middle of next year. The financial terms of the deal weren't released.
"This is our third major renewable energy transaction in Texas since 2016," said Digital Realty Senior Director of Sustainability Aaron Binkley. "We are pleased to be able to expand access to renewable energy for our customers while making additional progress towards our Science Based Target Initiative carbon emissions reduction commitment. The Phoenix Solar Project supplies renewable energy at scale in proximity to our Dallas data centers, expanding on our ongoing efforts to enhance local sustainable business practices across our global portfolio."
With Phoenix Solar, Digital Realty's expands its use of renewable energy by approximately 160,000 megawatt-hours per year. Monday's news built on the wind energy project the company announced in April, which added a total of 262,800 megawatt-hours of new clean energy to the regional electric grid. In total, the projects are expected to generate enough electricity to meet the needs of 50,000 homes each year.
Digital Realty also announced on Monday that its 2323 Bryan Street facility, which is a major regional connectivity hub in downtown Dallas, was being upgraded with additional colocation capacity.
Along with Equinix, Digital Realty is among the world's largest colocation providers. It has been a busy year to date for Digital Realty. In June, Digital Realty and Ascenty announced they would build two new data centers in Mexico for a large global cloud provider. The two companies didn't identify the cloud provider that will be using the new facilities in Queretaro, Mexico, but did say they had long-term, multi-megawatt agreements in place.
Also in June, Vapor IO and Digital Realty launched their integrated platform that reaches from the network core to the edge in three cities. After announcing a partnership in October, the combination of Digital Realty's PlatformDIGITAL and Vapor IO's Kinetic Edge platform is now live in Atlanta, Dallas and Chicago.
RELATED: Digital Realty closes $8.4 billion deal to buy Interxion
In March, Digital Realty closed its $8.4 billion deal to buy European data center operator Interxion