"The agreement with Fortum provides long-term financial certainty for the Loviisa plant, which currently generates about 10% of Finland's electricity.

Fortum said Google's commitment would support an investment programme aimed at extending the life of the nuclear station and increasing its generating capacity."

Long-term PPAs are what you usually want because they are bankable and give you solid demand on which to expand. Which is literally what they're talking about doing.

If I build a house and the demand goes up I don't have to build the solar panels (and everything else involved) to cover it, I pay the utility company to build that based on how much I'm needing to use. Well, normally I pay for whatever they think will make them the most money to deliver that much electricity - Google is specifically paying to make sure they see the utility company sees it as increased demand and revenue for more nuclear.

I think government regulations to put a cap on utility profits is a better long term move. Force excess to be directed into green energy expansion.

You now have a PhD in your pocket.

Is that not the miracle of the free market?

King Richard II would have killed for an iPhone, PS5, air conditioning, and Uber Eats. He'd swap places with you, and he was king. You don't realize how awesome you have it.

Just a hundred years ago your ancestors were (probably) eating rotten meat and drinking unclean water.

This is a case where the supply was about to be gone and Google provided funds to keep it operating (the original nuclear reactor began operation in 1977 and it now needed EUR 700M to extend the service life). And one can probably guess that this supply just wasn’t cost competitive in the first place, but Google increased the demand so much that it now becomes cost competitive.

Don't forget that they buy countless things from China, who is by a very large margin the largest polluter in the world.

> But if what’s happening is they’re displacing previous nuclear power users onto dirtier, that’s not really reducing carbon

That's not the case, because in EU (and thus Finland) electric production is under cap-and-trade. There is just no way to increase dirty electricity production in EU. Apart from political pressure to change rules, which for example Italy is doing because Italy built their grid on gas...

> they’re displacing previous nuclear power users onto dirtier

They are not. The plant may not survive beyond 2030 without this order.

It's a good thing that green energy isn't a fixed quantity and more can be built if there's demand, which is exactly what Google is doing.

It's great for marketing and, you're right, that's why they are doing it but the reason it's good for marketing is that their customers care about the environment. This is the exact invisible hand mechanism in action. It's their preferences changing the behavior of one of the biggest corporations in the world and all they can do is act like it doesn't count because they don't actually care