HELSINKI (Reuters) -Norway’s Equinor is combining its renewables business with its gas-to-power plants and energy storage assets to boost its electricity business, the company said on Thursday.
The move is a response to the surging demand for power fuelled by the expansion of artificial intelligence, data centres, and the green transition, said Equinor, which still gets the vast majority of its income from oil and gas.
“By combining our renewable portfolio with our flexible power offering, we can strengthen our competitiveness and value creation in the power market,” CEO Anders Opedal said in a statement.
The company has three “mega offshore wind projects” underway in Britain, the United States and Poland, and an increasing number of onshore renewables assets, it added.
While wind and solar use has grown to about a third of Europe’s energy mix, their intermittent nature means that storage and other solutions are crucial to deploying the large volumes of green power needed to decarbonise the electricity supply.
“While the demand for electricity from renewable power will continue to grow, flexible power will ensure reliability and stability in the power offering to the market,” Equinor said in the statement.
Global electricity consumption from data centres is expected to rise to around 945 terawatt hours by 2030 in a base-case scenario, the International Energy Agency said in a report on Thursday.
Earlier this year, Equinor scrapped a pledge to devote more than 50% of its gross capital expenditure to renewables and low-carbon solutions by 2030 and weakened its energy transition plan due to industry headwinds.
(Reporting by Essi Lehto and Stine Jacobsen. Editing by Terje Solsvik and Mark Potter)
