Summary
- The 15-year agreement covers the full output of the 155MWac Crooked Creek solar project.
- RWE expects to begin construction during 2026 and start commercial operation in 2028.
- The project will supply the Southwest Power Pool market rather than connect directly to a single Google facility.
RWE has signed a 15-year power purchase agreement with Google covering the full output of its planned 155MWac Crooked Creek solar project in Oklahoma.
RWE expects to begin onsite construction in McCurtain County later in 2026, with commercial operation scheduled for 2028. The project will deliver electricity into the Southwest Power Pool, supporting Google’s power demand across the regional market.
The arrangement is a grid-based corporate PPA rather than a dedicated wire connecting the solar farm to one data centre. Electricity produced by Crooked Creek will enter the wider system, while the contract provides Google with the associated commercial and environmental attributes.
RWE expects the construction phase to support as many as 250 workers at peak. The company estimates $24.3m of local economic activity and $1.4m in state and local tax revenue during development and construction.
Over its operating life, the project is expected to generate approximately $25m for county programmes, emergency medical services, schools, and regional technical education.
Crooked Creek will be RWE’s first solar project in Oklahoma. The company already operates the 148MW Boiling Springs wind farm in the state and has six further power projects totalling 1.6GW under development.
A PPA adds generation, not firm capacity
The agreement gives RWE a long-term buyer for the project’s output and gives Google a contractual route to support new generation in the same wholesale market as its operations.
It does not mean Google’s facilities will operate only when the solar farm is producing electricity. Data centres require continuous supply, while solar output follows daylight and weather conditions.
The grid balances those differences through other generation, storage, imports, and demand. Google’s physical electricity supply will continue to depend on the broader Southwest Power Pool system.
The distinction is important when corporate PPAs are described as powering a data centre. The annual volume purchased can match consumption over time without matching every hour of demand.
Hourly matching requires a broader portfolio, including generation with different output profiles, storage, demand flexibility, and contracts across multiple locations. Even then, the local transmission network must be capable of delivering electricity when and where the data centre requires it.
The Crooked Creek timetable also shows the delay between signing an agreement and receiving output. Construction is expected to start during 2026, while commercial operation is planned for 2028. Google must meet its intervening power needs through existing arrangements.
Long-term offtake can make a generation project financeable by creating predictable revenue. Data centre and cloud companies have become major corporate buyers because their large, stable loads can support contracts measured in hundreds of megawatts.
The model has direct relevance to Europe, where RWE and other generators are using corporate PPAs to finance wind and solar capacity. European projects face the same questions around additionality, grid congestion, market location, and the gap between annual energy matching and continuous supply.
A PPA can reduce exposure to wholesale price movements, but the value depends on contract structure. Settlement terms, negative prices, curtailment, congestion, guarantees of origin, and differences between the generation and consumption profiles all affect the final economics.
Google’s agreement also reflects competition for future generation. Hyperscale buyers are contracting projects years before operation as data centre pipelines increase the amount of electricity they expect to consume.
RWE gains a bankable customer for its first Oklahoma solar development, while Google adds another long-term supply agreement in a market where it has operated a data centre campus at Pryor since 2011.
Crooked Creek will add 155MW of generation to the regional system when complete. Its contribution to Google’s infrastructure strategy will be measured through contracted energy over time, while the reliability of the company’s data centres remains a product of the entire grid and their own resilience systems.
