Growing together with our strategic customers

The relatively slow pace of major industrial decarbonisation investments in the Nordic countries is often attributed to a classic chicken-and-egg problem. Energy-intensive industries are reluctant to pursue new business opportunities without certainty over the availability of electricity or visibility on future power prices. For these companies, electricity is no longer merely a cost item. It is a strategic factor that has a fundamental impact on their competitiveness, investment decisions and ability to keep carbon emissions low.

At the same time, energy companies are reluctant to invest in new power generation in highly volatile markets without certainty over future customer demand and revenue streams. The result is that both sides wait for the other to move first. The solution, however, is within reach: long-term strategic partnerships. And that is exactly what the partnership between Google and Fortum is about – on a significant scale.

Success for both

Over the past few years, we at Fortum have been building a commercial strategy centred on creating value together with our customers. This has been a major shift: we have gradually moved from being a power generator that sells most of its electricity on the power exchange to a provider of bilateral energy solutions. For us, this means listening closely to our customers’ needs so that we can find the right solutions from our product offering – whether long-term Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs), energy portfolio management expertise, value-adding products or other forms of energy partnership. We help our customers succeed while growing our own business.

What sets Fortum apart is, above all, our ability to combine deep industry expertise with a customer-centric approach. We have the experience, resources and technical capabilities to provide reliable and innovative solutions for a wide range of customer needs. We can also adapt quickly and support our customers as their needs evolve.

Critical digital infrastructure as a driver of growth

The new partnership between Google and Fortum is a prime example of succeeding together. At the centre of the partnership is a 22-year PPA covering up to 50% of our Loviisa nuclear power plant’s capacity. For Google, it secures a significant volume of reliable, fossil-free baseload electricity to power its 13S-billion-euro investments in Finland. For Fortum, it provides the long-term revenue certainty needed for the major investments required to extend the lifetime of the Loviisa power plant.

And that is by no means all. Google’s ambitious approach is to meet their growth with additional low-carbon electricity, and we look forward to bringing new fossil-free power generation online together in support of their growing digital infrastructure in Finland. We will also advance new flexible capacity and work together to improve the competitiveness of new nuclear projects. We have structured our agreement to ensure that as demand for AI services grows, additional low-carbon energy will be deployed to help safeguard long-term power supply for Finnish consumers and businesses.

This is the largest PPA Fortum has ever signed and probably the biggest nuclear PPA ever signed in Europe. We are pleased that, through this partnership, we can help unlock the opportunities that the next wave of industrial growth can bring to Finland’s economy: jobs, new innovations, tax revenue and prosperity for people in Finland. These are the opportunities made possible by electrification and digitalisation.