Corporate renewable power purchase agreements (PPAs) have long been dominated by heavy industry and the IT sector. Amazon, Meta, Google and Microsoft were the four biggest corporate buyers of renewables globally in 2022, followed by mining company Codelco, auto manufacturer Ford and chemicals giant Ineos. However, new data from the RE-Source Platform, the EU’s leading forum for corporate renewable energy sourcing, demonstrates how a wide variety of sectors are now investing in corporate renewable PPAs, as more and more companies look to decarbonise.
There are now nine sectors where overall contracted corporate renewable PPAs stand at more than 500MW of capacity in EU, with the financial services and engineering and technology sectors crossing that milestone in 2023.
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At the front of these nine sectors is the telecoms sector. PPAs with a capacity of just under 2.5GW have cumulatively been contracted in telecoms in Europe between 2013 and the start of October 2023, with the likes of Telecom Italia, Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom all recently signing PPAs.
The professional services sector, meanwhile, has seen the biggest growth in contracted renewable PPA capacity in the EU this year, with nearly threefold growth in capacity in the space of just nine months. Specifically, there is 277% more capacity contracted at the end of Q3 2023 (96.5MW) in professional services than there was at the end of 2022 (25.6MW).
Other sectors recording massive PPA growth in the EU during the first nine months of this year are retail (up 72.5% on the end of last year), followed by the food and drinks sector (up 61.9%), the transport sector (up 57.2%) and the automotive sector (up 45.5%).
IT and heavy industry also continue to report strong data, recording 22% and 25% growth over the first nine months of the year, respectively. They now have 11.3GW and 9GW of renewable PPA capacity contracted each.
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By GlobalDataEditor's note: This story is part of a series of articles Energy Monitor is producing as part of a media partnership with the RE-Source Platform (WindEurope, SolarPower Europe, RE100 and wbcsd) for RE-Source 2023, an annual gathering of European renewable energy buyers and suppliers, in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, on 26 and 27 October.
