By Fabiana Negrin Ochoa


Japanese trading company Itochu Corp. has signed agreements to supply U.S. tech giants Amazon.com Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. with renewable energy.

Itochu on Wednesday said its portfolio company, Clean Energy Connect Ltd., has signed a deal to develop solar-power plants at 700 locations to provide Amazon with renewable energy in Japan. Under the power-purchase agreement, CEC, which develops and operates multiple small- and medium-sized solar plants, will supply Amazon with 108 megawatts of power by 2024, according to the statement.

Itochu said there is increasing momentum in Japan to rely less on the country's feed-in-tariff program and introduce renewable power supply "such as by newly building a power plant exclusively for use by a company."

Amazon--the world's largest corporate buyer of renewable energy--has said it is on track to use only renewable power sources by 2025.

Itochu, which is involved in trading products including textiles, machinery and metals, said in a separate statement Wednesday that it will supply Meta with energy from a wind-power plant in Texas under a long-term power-purchase agreement.

The Facebook parent reached its 100% renewable-energy target across global operations in 2020, and had contracts in place for more than 9,000MW of solar and wind energy as of end-2022, up from 7,500MW as of end-2021.

The energy supplied to Meta will be come from a wind-power plant near Houston that Itochu is investing in via a special purpose entity together with investment firm Fengate Asset Management and GE Energy Financial Services, a business unit of GE. The plant, due to start operating by the end of the year once construction is completed, has a total generating capacity of 160MW.

Two of Itochu's U.S.-based subsidiaries, Tyr Energy and NAES Corp., will jointly manage power sales in Texas, it said in the statement.

The move is the Japanese company's latest expansion into renewables in the U.S. Itochu has invested in six wind-power projects via Kansas-based Tyr, as well as over 30 power plants, and is developing renewable projects with a combined generating capacity of approximately 2GW. It said it aims to expand its renewables footprint in North America "by leveraging the capability of NAES...the largest independent power-plant operation and maintenance service company in the world."


Write to Fabiana Negrin Ochoa at fabiana.negrinochoa@wsj.com


(END) Dow Jones Newswires

02-15-23 0226ET