Summary
- Google has agreed a 22-year PPA that will eventually cover up to 50% of Loviisa nuclear power plant's capacity.
- Fortum links the contract to its roughly €1bn lifetime-extension programme and an additional proposed 10MW uprate.
- The agreement couples long-term data centre demand with investment certainty for existing firm low-carbon generation.
Fortum has signed a 22-year power purchase agreement with Google that will eventually contract up to half of the capacity of Finland’s Loviisa nuclear power plant, providing long-term revenue support for the plant’s extension through 2050.
The agreement starts in 2028 with a smaller contracted volume and is due to reach 50% of Loviisa’s capacity for the period from 2030 to 2049. It accompanies Google’s newly announced €13 billion Finnish data centre and infrastructure investment programme and places firm nuclear generation at the centre of the energy strategy supporting that expansion.
Loviisa consists of two 507MWe pressurised-water reactors commissioned in 1977 and 1980. Fortum says the plant produces around 8TWh of electricity each year and accounts for approximately 10% of Finnish electricity supply.
The utility is undertaking an investment programme worth about €1 billion between 2023 and 2050 to support continued operation. Roughly €700 million of the capital expenditure required to maintain the plant through 2050 remains subject to investment decisions, alongside about 80% of the individual projects in the lifetime-extension programme.
Fortum said the Google contract provides the revenue certainty needed to proceed with investments associated with the full extension. It also expects the arrangement to enable an additional 10MW increase in plant output, on top of a previously planned 38MW uprate expected to enter service in 2028.
The commercial effect is unusually visible because Fortum has quantified what the long-duration contract means for its own investment case. Once half of Loviisa’s generating capacity is contracted, the company expects the PPA to increase group comparable return on net assets by around 1.4 percentage points over time.
That structure illustrates one route through which large data centre loads can support existing low-carbon generation without relying solely on shorter-term power purchasing. A 22-year demand commitment changes the revenue profile of a generating asset whose remaining life requires substantial capital expenditure, while giving Google access to predictable volumes of firm generation close to its established Hamina data centre.
The physical proximity is notable. Loviisa is around 55 kilometres from Google’s Hamina facility, although electricity continues to flow through the Finnish power system rather than through a dedicated private connection. The value of the agreement lies in contracting generation and supporting investment at system level, not in creating an isolated supply arrangement between the plant and the data centre.
The two companies are extending the relationship beyond the PPA. A memorandum of understanding covers new nuclear and renewable generation, flexibility, and energy portfolio management. Fortum and Google will examine business models that could improve the competitiveness of potential new reactors at Loviisa, as well as possible use of Fortum’s powered-land portfolio for future Google data centres.
Fortum has an 8GW Nordic renewable-development pipeline at the permitting stage and aims to have 1.2GW of renewables ready to build and 2.5GW of new flexibility services and generation assets ready to deploy by the end of 2028. The first concrete flexibility project linked to the Google relationship is a 94MW battery system planned beside Google’s Kajaani data centre site, which Fortum will optimise.
The package therefore combines three different parts of the electricity problem created by expanding data centre loads: keeping existing firm generation operating, adding new generation, and creating flexible capacity able to respond to system conditions.
For Finland, the scale of Google’s proposed investment means those issues cannot be separated from broader network planning. The nuclear PPA does not by itself provide all of the electricity required by Google’s expansion, and neither company has disclosed the final load of the four-site programme. It does, however, place a long-lived commercial commitment behind a major existing generating asset while the next phase of Finnish data centre capacity is built.
