Tech energy news — Meta signed three deals this week to procure nearly 1 gigawatt of solar power, pushing its total solar purchases past 3 gigawatts this year. AI is hungry for electricity, and solar is the cheapest, fastest thing on the menu. The catch: part of Meta’s buying spree is paper offsets, not new power plants.
By Maplestime Tech Desk | Canada | September 19, 2026
Sources: TechCrunch, Meta | Last updated: September 19, 2026
Key Takeaways
- Meta signed three solar deals this week totalling nearly 1 GW of capacity
- Its total solar purchases this year now exceed 3 GW
- The biggest deal: 600 MW from a massive solar farm near Lubbock, Texas, starting commercial operations in 2027
- Two Louisiana deals cover 385 MW combined — but as environmental attribute certificates, not direct power
- Experts say environmental attribute certificates obscure tech companies’ true carbon footprint and no longer drive new renewable builds
Three Deals, Nearly a Gigawatt
Meta announced two agreements in Louisiana this week in which it’s buying the environmental attributes of a combined 385 megawatts of electricity. Both projects are expected to be completed two years from now.
They follow a larger deal announced Monday: Meta bought 600 megawatts from a massive solar farm near Lubbock, Texas, which will start commercial operations in 2027.
Solar is cheap and quick to build, which is why it’s become the go-to power source for tech companies as their data centre fleets multiply in size. Meta’s AI ambitions — the models, the inference, the always-on data centres — all run on electricity, and the company is scrambling to line up supply.
The Grid, Not the Data Centre
Here’s the nuance. The Texas power plant won’t connect directly to Meta data centres. It feeds into the local grid, offsetting the facilities’ use. That’s normal for utility-scale renewables — and it does add real clean power to the grid.
The Louisiana deals are a different instrument: purchasing certificates that allow Meta to offset its carbon-intensive power sources. These environmental attribute certificates (EACs) — sometimes called renewable energy certificates — have been criticized by experts for obscuring the true carbon footprint of tech companies’ operations, which have ballooned as AI has driven electricity use through the roof.
Why the Certificates Don’t Impress Experts
EACs were introduced years ago, when renewables were expensive relative to fossil fuel generators. They let anyone buy the electricity, while giving companies an option to pay extra to offset their own emissions — and offset the higher cost of renewable power. They helped developers build more renewable projects.
But the cost of new solar and wind has dropped dramatically since then. Renewables now undercut new fossil power — and sometimes existing coal and natural gas plants. EACs don’t provide the same incentive they once did, and experts question how much additional renewable power they actually stimulate.
The experts’ verdict: if companies truly want to offset their new AI-driven energy use, they should be pushing developers to build new renewable capacity — not buying paper certificates for power that would exist anyway.
The Bigger Picture: AI’s Power Problem Is Just Starting
Meta’s 3 GW of solar this year is a serious procurement number. But it’s worth remembering what it represents: an offset against one of the fastest-growing electricity loads in corporate history. AI data centres are being built faster than clean power can be permitted and constructed.
Buying solar is the easy part. Making the accounting honest — and making sure new demand actually drives new clean generation — is the hard part. Meta gets credit for the scale of its buying. The question experts keep asking is whether any of it would exist without the AI boom forcing the issue.
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