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Data Center PPAs With Renewable Generators Slump Over Pricing, Wind Project Delays

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Power purchase agreements between electricity suppliers and European data centers decreased in total volume to 2.6 gigawatts in 2025, down from 4.2 GW of new deals the year before, Rystad Energy said on Thursday.

It said the decrease relates to delays in offshore wind projects and disagreements on pricing due to falling capture rates and increasingly frequent negative wholesale power price hours, especially for solar PV installations.

The scramble to secure green power for the electricity-devouring data centers has prompted developers to reconsider whether they are best served by seeking to power them with clean energy or conventional, the research note said.

"The gap between surging capacity and declining PPA activity raises urgent questions about how new data center load will be powered," Rystad said.

Data centers will increasingly make their presence felt in power markets in the coming years due to growing AI computing infrastructure needs. Their capacity, measured in power consumption terms, will likely grow to 36 GW by 2030, up from 16 GW in 2024, the note said.

A large slice of this growth will occur in the UK, Germany, France and the Netherlands but there will also be significant additions in Ireland, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Italy and Finland as capacity constraints in some congested hubs, with longer permitting timelines, deter some investors.

The lower ambient temperatures in Nordic countries reduce cooling costs while also offering abundant low-carbon hydropower.

The research said that PPA volumes are down in the past two years across all technologies, with offshore wind experiencing the biggest drop. Offshore wind volumes committed via PPA fell to 0.5 GW in 2025, down from 1.35 GW in 2024. In Q1, 2026, this fell to just 100 megawatts from a single Google deal with EnBW in Germany.

Data centers accounted for a fifth of all European offtake since 2024, coming second to manufacturing and industry power procurement.

Rystad said the explanation for the broad decline was that offshore wind project delays mean there is less capacity available while there is also a widening gap between developer asking prices and off-taker bids, especially in solar.

There are also some signs of backtracking on clean energy commitments with Microsoft said to be reconsidering its 100% carbon-free energy promise while Google recently said it may struggle to match its hourly electricity consumption matching target by 2030, Rystad said.

Meanwhile deals involving nuclear power in 2025 emerged as a notable trend that indicates more offtakers have been seeking baseload-type power to avoid renewables' intermittency.

Rystad said that looking ahead, a recovery in the pipeline of connected offshore wind projects will be key to ending stagnation in PPAs.

The other key driver would be the revival of clean energy commitments by big data companies, potentially either through regulatory obligation or reputational pressure.

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