By Arif Gasilov, Partner, Gasilov Group

Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft currently account for 49% of all corporate clean PPA volumes globally in 2025, contracting more than 27 GW between the four of them. The interesting change is that generation mixes are becoming more and more firm, as developers selling baseload-like products such as co-located solar+storage, hybrid wind+solar represented seven of the top ten PPA sellers. Google signed 1 GW of solar with TotalEnergies in Texas alone.

This massive increase in procurement is being caused by multiple state mandates that makes new clean energy a safe path forward for data center operators, and it’s creating near-guaranteed demand for solar+storage developers. More than 300 data center bills were introduced in 30 states in the first six weeks of 2026, and states are requiring data centers to procure new clean energy and pay their own infrastructure costs (cost-causation).

For example, Washington’s HB 2515 requires 80% clean electricity by 2031, with an increase to 100% by 2046, from generation built after January 1, 2026. Illinois’ proposed POWER Act would require hyperscale data centers (50+ MW peak demand) to pay for their own new renewable generation, with fast-track interconnection rewards/incentives for those that manage to achieve clean energy commitments by certain deadlines. Oregon’s POWER Act created a separate rate class for data centers at 20+ MW, resulting in a significant 29% energy cost increase for large data center customers and a 1.3% decrease for residential customers. Germany’s EnEfG mandates 100% renewable electricity for data centers by January 2027. New York is considering requirements that data centers procure new clean energy within NYISO territory. A data center subject to Washington’s law needs solar+storage that did not exist before 2026, which means guaranteed offtake for developers who can deliver it.

The interconnection bottleneck, and two ways around it
Median time from request to commercial operation has doubled (per Berkeley Lab) since the early 2000s, to over four years. And only 13% of capacity that entered queues from 2000-2019 reached commercial operation by end-2024.

Two pathways exist for faster connections:
– PJM’s Board approved a voluntary Bring Your Own New Generation (BYONG) program with an expedited interconnection track: 10 months from application vs. years in the standard queue, with the data center/LSE paying 100% of network upgrades.
– Surplus interconnection at existing gas plants. A UC Berkeley working paper identified 68 gas plants near active data center developments with enough surplus interconnection capacity for solar+storage, bypassing the queue. These plants are underutilized (combustion turbines averaging a 9.5% capacity factor), and most have enough adjacent land for solar at five times the plant’s gas capacity. Levelized costs for the hybrid solar+storage+gas system range from 60-138 USD/MWh, competitive with what data centers are paying for 24/7 clean power elsewhere (Microsoft’s Three Mile Island nuclear is estimated at 100-140 USD/MWh incl. transmission).

Cleanview’s analysis (cited in Utility Dive) found that roughly 30% of planned U.S. data center capacity will use behind-the-meter resources, with 90% of those projects announced in 2025. Of behind-the-meter assets identified through permits, about 75% use natural gas, and “virtually none of the developers planned to build renewables in the short term.” Developers are going BTM because the queue is too slow… but almost none are building renewables there. The surplus-interconnection approach gives solar+storage the speed to compete with gas in the BTM segment.

Some recent examples include Google’s $4.75 billion acquisition of Intersect Power, with vertical integration of data center and energy infrastructure and projects including 840 MW of solar and 1,300 MWh of storage in Haskell County, TX. Google also co-developed a Clean Transition Tariff with NV Energy to fund 150 MW of geothermal, and a similar tariff with Xcel Energy in Minnesota covering 1.4 GW of wind, 200 MW of solar, and 300 MW of long-duration storage. Georgia Power added a Customer-Identified Resource option where data centers identify and bring specific clean resources to the utility’s portfolio. Meanwhile, battery pack prices fell 45% in a single year to 70 USD/kWh for stationary storage (BloombergNEF, cited in ModulEdge).

Another major advantage of solar+storage is water efficiency in the context of permitting. Gas-fired power plants consume roughly 2,800 gallons of water per MWh, while solar and wind require none. Because the majority of a data center’s total water footprint is indirect, from its electricity source, municipalities are already blocking proposals over water. For example, in Newton County, GA, a single Meta data center uses 10% of the county’s water, and new proposals would more than double total county consumption. As such, for developers, solar+storage preempts the water objection that can delay or block permits in water-stressed communities.

In sum, the highest-value contracts are going to projects that deliver firmness over intermittent solar, because data centers want reliable power. Thus, solar+storage that provides output similar to baseload becomes competitive for premium PPAs. The PJM expedited track and state mandate timelines create urgency, so projects have some time before these programs get oversubscribed. Existing gas plants with surplus interconnection are worth the diligence given 333 GW of nationwide potential and 10-month interconnection timelines, and tracking state regulatory dockets matters because this market is state-specific.

These are the author’s own views and do not reflect the views of REGlobal