Microsoft is partnering with Brookfield Asset Management to develop 10.5 GW of new wind and solar, Siemens Gamesa reports a €365 million loss in the 2nd quarter of 2024, WEG will begin manufacturing their 7 GW turbine platform in Minnesota, and Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board and Global Infrastructure Partners acquire Allete.



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Allen Hall: I'm Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I'm here with the founder and CEO of IntelStor, Phil Totaro, and the chief commercial officer of Weather Guard, Joel Saxum. And this is your News Flash. News Flash is brought to you by our friends at IntelStor. If you want market intelligence that generates revenue, then book a demonstration of IntelStor at intelstor. com.



Microsoft has partnered with Canada's Brookfield Asset Management to develop new wind and solar farms aiming to bring 10. 5 gigawatts of generating capacity online. The partnership is expected to help finance renewable electricity projects to be built between 2026 and 2030. 30 starting in the U.S. and eventually Europe. The deal is estimated to cost over 10 billion U. S. dollars, and it highlights the race to meet clean energy commitments while satisfying the growing energy demands of cloud computing and A. I. Now, Phil, we all know that A. I. is going to be expensive in the electricity world.



Everybody is worried about it. Microsoft is trying to hedge their bets at the minute. Do you expect others like an Amazon to do something similar?



Philip Totaro: Amazon's been up until this deal, once it officially closes and they actually build and start procuring all this. This is going to be the biggest corporate renewables procurement in history.



Amazon's been doing their fair share and was leading up until this point. But this is this is massive. So it let's put it this way. It looks like, deals like this are going to finally get the tech sector in the mood to say, all right, we like, fixed price contracts with, some degree of certainty and, proven technology now between wind and solar particularly for cloud applications or AI applications where, it's going to be, power intensive, I think, the tech sector in general needs needed to, and is getting more on board with this.



Even, my own company builds on AWS. We've, contributed to them procuring some renewables capacity as well. And we're taking the benefit of that too.



Joel Saxum: It's nice to see Microsoft getting involved in an early stage here, right? At the pipe, not even during the pipeline exercise, but during the pipeline build out of guys, we were going to want this, we're going to partner with a major developer being Brookfield Renewables, who has a large capital base behind them, of course.



But at the start of it saying we want to do this because you do see the virtual PPAs and those on the corporate PPAs being, But it's usually like when they're about built, of course, along the time, the sales people from that energy company are shopping them. But you don't see the agreements happen at an earlier stage like this very often.



So with Microsoft, of course, being a large consumer of power for, of course, computing, but also the cooling of these centers is going to be a large cost as well. Being a looking in, into their crystal ball and seeing that energy usage going up and up and up, they're getting to getting engaged with a major developer at an early pipelin...