Google is buying gas. The hyperscale tech company — which invented the power purchase agreement as a way to support renewables development in the 2010s and has been a leader in setting standards for and procuring renewable power — announced on Thursday that it is agreeing to buy the majority of the power generated by a planned natural gas-fired plant in Decatur, Illinois. Here’s the twist: The plant will also capture and store its carbon emissions, a first of its kind installation at commercial scale.
The Broadwing Energy Center will be developed by Low Carbon Infrastructure on a site owned by agribusiness giant ADM. The facility features an existing ethanol plant with carbon capture and storage nearby, including the Class VI wells necessary for carbon dioxide sequestration. The plant will provide 400 megawatts of power, as well as steam for the ADM facility.
“We’re going to work with LCI to hopefully have it all up and running by early 2030,” Michael Terrell, Google’s head of advanced energy, told me.
While CCS has not yet been developed at anything like a commercial scale, it is already both a bogeyman and a panacea in the decarbonization debate — or as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has called it, “an oil exec’s fantasy, an environmentalist’s nightmare, and an energy expert’s object of fascination.”
Natural gas with CCS promises the dispatchability of natural gas — power produced exactly when and in the exact amounts the grid needs — without the greenhouse emissions of traditional gas plants. The problem is that the technology is expensive, meaning that its development has largely been seen to depend on emissions regulations that would essentially force generators to build or install CCS.
Those regulations were finalized during the final year of Biden’s presidency and, unsurprisingly, are no longer happening. That leaves the private sector to bear the cost and technological uncertainty of CCS development, with little obvious financial incentive to do so.
While this is Google’s first gas deal, it is not entirely unexpected. Google hit its initial goal of matching its worldwide energy consumption with renewable energy generation on an annual basis in 2017, upgrading that goal in 2020 to aim at generating clean power on a 24/7 basis in the same area that its energy consumption occurs by 2030.
This meant going beyond wind and solar and procuring power from generators that worked in all weather and at night.
In the same 2020 whitepaper where Google set out its hourly matching goal, it specifically mentioned CCS as one of “a number of emergent technologies” that “appear to be making good progress.”
In another 2023 whitepaper, Google affirmed its commitment to clean firm technology beyond wind and solar, adding that “we must also develop and commercialize new technologies to fully decarbonize electricity systems quickly and cost-effectively while maintaining reliability.” Once again it called out “power generation with carbon capture and storage” by name.
Since then Google has struck a number of deals to support clean firm development, including a development agreement with the advanced nuclear company Kairos and a “clean transition tariff” agreement with utility NV Energy to pay for geothermal power in Nevada produced by the enhanced geothermal company Fervo.
But carbon capture and storage remained in the picture as something that would be key for Google to meet its goals. “We set 24/7 carbon free energy as our North Star,” Terrell told me. “The other critical piece to that is CCS.”
At the same time, Google — and the rest of the technology industry — has been on a data center building spree, moving as fast as it can to put up bigger data centers that turn electricity into artificial intelligence. This has meant rising power usage and emissions. In 2024, Google reported that its emissions had gone up almost 50% over the previous five years, following a similar announcement from Microsoft.
“We’re still committed to those goals. They’re extremely ambitious, and we’ve never been shy about sharing that. 24/7 carbon free energy is a moonshot, but we are pushing very, very hard,” Terrell said.
The turn to CCS is not just driven by the advantages gas has over renewables — namely dispatchability — but also by the current political environment.
Google has a long track record of buying the output from renewables projects, including wind, in the broader Midcontinent Independent System Operator grid, where the Decatur project sits. But on a national basis, Terrell noted, “we’re seeing headwinds in the market due to policy changes” for renewables.
Solar and wind have now lost some of the incentives that spurred huge growth in both sectors in recent years, while projects that can pass the regulatory gauntlet have to linger in interconnection queues to get approved by electricity markets and often require transmission that can be expensive and challenging to build. The Trump administration has specifically targeted renewables — especially wind — for regulatory scrutiny, which will likely hinder renewable development in MISO, which gets 15% of its power from wind — far more than from solar, and about comparable with its nuclear generation.
“The markets are tough because of some of the changes in policy, interconnection rules, and lack of transmission,” Terrell said. “That’s certainly affecting our ability to procure with speed and scale.”
Google and LCI claim that the Broadwing plant will be able to capture and store over 90% of its carbon dioxide emissions.
The project started, LCI chief executive Jonathan Wiens told me, in 2020, primarily as an industrial decarbonization project to provide low-emissions steam to ADM for its food processing efforts, with the rest of the power going to the grid.“In the midst of this development,” Wiens said, “there were data centers that were 40 megawatts. Now they’re aspiring to be a gigawatt-plus, and it’s totally changed the power end of this.”
Of Google, he said, “they put their money where their mouth is and they’re willing to participate in a project.”
Both Terrell and Wiens confirmed that Google wanted to work with LCI beyond developing and purchasing power from the Broadwing facility. “It’s not just this one plant,” Wiens said. “It’s a much broader approach to deploying this in as many places as we can.”
Google did not disclose the terms of the PPA, but Terrell said, “We believe that CCS can be competitive at scale with other generation technologies, and certainly other low carbon or zero carbon generation technologies.”
Over time, he added, LCI and Google should be able to drive down prices as they work on more power plants. “That’s certainly something that we’re hoping to do.”
Seems significant. CGEP