P&G to power US factories with wind, Google buys into Africa’s largest wind farm

Global consumer products giant Procter and Gamble has become the latest big US corporate to invest in renewable energy, in a deal to build a wind farm in Texas that will power all of its North American factories.

The company will team with EFD renewables to build the wind farm in Cooke County – EDF is funding the project, but P&G has signed a 12-year contract to buy power from it.

Scheduled to be operational in December 2016, the finished wind farm will reportedly produce 370,000MWh of electricity annually — enough to power nearly 34,000 homes a year, or in P&G’s case, enough to manufacture its US fabric and home care products, the company’s largest division by sales.

The deal is said to be Procter & Gamble’s biggest foray into wind power, and the latest in a spate of partnerships between major American corporations and renewable energy companies.

According to the New York Times, the initiative also represents an opportunity for P&G “to garner good will with environmentally conscious consumers at a time when personal care companies are under more pressure than ever to respond to their concerns.”

“More and more, we find a very large number — call it two-thirds of consumers — looking to make some kind of contribution in the space, and hopefully not making trade-offs in value or performance,” said Shailesh Jejurikar, president of P.&G.’s North American fabric care division.

P&G has pledged to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 30 per cent by 2020, so the new wind farm will help achieve this, but the decision to go with wind is not just an environmental one.

According to Bloomberg analysis from earlier this month, wind power is now the cheapest electricity to produce in both Germany and the UK, even without government subsidies – marking the first time that threshold has been crossed by a G7 economy. And it’s not far behind this point in the US.

Last year, another US multi-billion dollar company, candy maker Mars Inc, invested in the Mesquite Creek wind farm – also in Texas – which generates 200MW of wind power, enough to electrify 61,000 American homes, or the equivalent of what Mars claims is sufficient to power its entire US operation.

Google, meanwhile, recently made its 22nd investment in clean energy infrastructure, via an as-yet undisclosed contribution to Africa’s largest wind power project – the Lake Turkana Wind Power Project in northern Kenya, which could provide enough clean energy to power 2 million homes, or about 15 per cent of the capacity of the country’s power grid.

By way of explanation, Rick Needham, a Google director of energy and sustainability, said the company wanted to promote clean energy in the developing world.

“The fastest growing economies are here, and there’s a strong need for critical power,” he says of places like Kenya. “Economies are being held back because they don’t have enough power – and yet they have wonderful renewable resources. These nations can meet their future and growing energy needs by tapping into some of the best renewable resources in the world.”

Where the lure of cheaper power doesn’t win over corporates, government policy might. Down south of Texas, in Mexico, the government has legislated that large consumers of power must get 5 per cent of their electricity from clean sources by 2018.

Those who don’t could be fined as much as $US200 per megawatt-hour used. Large industrial users may be required to buy clean-power certificates on the spot market, reports Bloomberg.