Verizon to Invest $100 Million in Renewable Energy
4 hours 5 minutes ago - DJNF
By Cassandra Sweet
Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ) said Tuesday that it plans to spend $100
million to install solar panels and fuel cells at more than a dozen
facilities that will generate and use the clean power.
California solar-panel maker and developer SunPower Corp. (SPWR) will supply
and install solar-panel systems at Verizon facilities in California, New
Jersey and four other states.
Fuel-cell maker ClearEdge Power, of Hillsboro, Ore., will supply and install
hydrogen fuel cells at facilities in California, New Jersey and New York,
the companies said.
Verizon decided to make the clean-energy investment out of a desire to be
more socially and environmentally responsible, and because the economics
made the plan worthwhile, said James Gowen, chief sustainability officer at
Verizon.
"We drive shareholder value, but we're also a good corporate citizen," Mr.
Gowen said in an interview.
Mr. Gowan suggested that customers, particularly for Verizon's large cloud-
computing and data-center business, increasingly expect suppliers to use
renewable energy to offset their carbon footprint.
The environmental group Greenpeace published a report in April 2012 that
ranked large tech companies by their efforts to use renewable energy to
power their data centers. In the report, Greenpeace lauded clean-energy
efforts by Google Inc. (GOOG) and Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO), for example, but gave
low marks to Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), saying those
companies relied too heavily on coal-fired and nuclear power. Verizon was
not included in the report.
Verizon plans to have 15 megawatts of clean power operating by 2014, Mr.
Gowan said. That's enough to serve more than 6,000 single-family homes a
year, and avoid generating 10,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year,
according to the company.
SunPower plans to install its solar panels on the roofs of a Verizon data
center in Silver Spring, Md., and at the company's operations center in
Basking Ridge, N.J., among other locations.
ClearEdge plans to install fuel cells at 10 Verizon facilities, including at
the company's Basking Ridge operations center and at call centers and data
centers.
In addition to being able to generate its own renewable electricity, which
will replace some of the power it now gets from utilities, Verizon sees the
solar-panel and fuel-cell systems providing a level of protection from power
outages on the grid, Mr. Gowan said.
ClearEdge Power's fuel cells can provide backup power during a storm or
other power outage, said David Wright, president and chief executive at
ClearEdge. The company has 23 fuel cells in New York and New Jersey that
continued operating after Hurricane Sandy hit the region in October 2012, Mr
. Wright said.
