FB inks pact with CleanMax to buy renewable power

Hyderabad: FACEBOOK, a social media company, has made an agreement with CleanMax, an India-based renewable energy company, to buy renewable power to supply to the India national electric grid. This is the first time that the Facebook is making an agreement in South Asian country.

The first project is a wind-based power plant located in Southern Karnataka with a generation capacity of 32 MW. The partnership is part of an agreement between Facebook and CleanMax to establish more wind and solar projects in south Asian region for supplying renewable power to India's electrical grid.

CleanMax will own and operate the projects, where as Facebook will buy the power using environment attributed certificates, or carbon credits.

The social media company will finance the renewable energy projects by signing a long-term electricity purchasing agreement but doesn't own the power plants, it said in a statement. Facebook has made similar agreements in Singapore with energy companies like Sunseap Group, Terrenus Energy and Sembcorp Industries on projects. The electricity generated from these plants will power the Facebook's Asian data centre in Singapore, which will start its operations next year as per company statement.

The social media company announced that the company's global operations are now supported wholly by renewable energy and that it has reached net-zero emissions. Other tech companies which operate the data centre like Amazon, Google were also plans to operate carbon-free and achieve net-zero emissions.

Facebook has largest users in India and owns the other social media platforms like Whatsapp, Instagram.