Equinix and Neoen sign first Power Purchase Agreement in Italy to support local grid decarbonisation
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Equinix and Neoen sign first Power Purchase Agreement in Italy to support local grid decarbonisation
Equinix , a digital infrastructure company , and Neoen , one of the world ’ s leading producers of exclusively renewable energy , have signed a 10-year virtual Power Purchase Agreement ( PPA ) of 53MW across seven new-build solar projects . This will support Equinix ’ s ability to maintain 100 % renewable coverage for its International Business Exchange ( IBX ) data centres in Italy while increasing its backing of renewable power projects .
The PPA includes seven of Neoen ’ s projects in Northern Italy , close to Equinix data centres in Milan and Genoa .
The PPA is structured under a portfolio approach . It is the first PPA signed between Neoen and Equinix in Italy and the fifth in Europe over the past three years . These five PPAs represent a total contracted capacity of 210MW across Finland , Sweden and now Italy – a testimony to the strong relationship between the two companies and their continued collaboration in various geographies .
It also brings Neoen ’ s total contracted capacity under corporate PPAs worldwide to over 2.8GW and Equinix ’ s global capacity under longterm renewable energy contracts to around 1.2GW .
The solar projects will contribute to Italy ’ s Integrated National Plan for Energy and Climate Change targets by 2030 .
Equinix is focused on expanding the breadth and quality of its renewables portfolio and has executed 24 Power Purchase Agreements in total to date across Australia , Singapore , India , France , Iberia , Italy , the Nordics and the US – including 15 PPAs signed in 2023 alone .
Once operational , these projects are expected to generate more than 3,200,000MWh of clean energy , equivalent to the energy needed to power more than 850,000 European households for a year .
With teams based in Brescia , Modena and Rome , Neoen has ambitions to become a major player in Italy and a significant contributor to the development of renewable energy in the country and is currently developing numerous solar and storage projects .
Cineca , ENEA and EUROfusion choose Lenovo Supercomputer to develop fusion energy research in Italy
Cineca has signed an agreement with Lenovo for the installation of a new High Performance Computing ( HPC ) system for the scientific community to research fusion energy .
The new infrastructure , with the logical name Pitagora , will be able to perform about 27 million billion operations per second ( PFlop / s ). It will be installed in the Cineca data centre in Casalecchio di Reno ( Bologna ) at the end of 2024 and will become part of the Bologna Technopole ecosystem .
The supercomputer will be dedicated to the numerical simulation of plasma physics and the structural analysis of advanced materials for nuclear fusion .
Cineca is a university consortium , one of the largest computing centres in Italy and one of the most advanced in the world for highperformance computing , home to numerous national and international HPC projects .
These projects are indispensable for development and innovation in various scientific and technological fields , based on computational methodology to support computational research in a wide range of sectors , from biodiversity to life sciences , from AI to materials science , from earth sciences to climatology .
Sanzio Bassini , Director of the HPC Cineca Department , said : “ Our goal is to continue to provide scientists with the most advanced computational tools to tackle the most complex scientific challenges of our time .”
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