Clearway Energy for years has been a safe bet for steady returns on utility-scale solar and wind farms. But in recent years the company has quietly repositioned itself as a power juggernaut prepared to meet record load growth from data centers.
The company’s privately owned development arm Clearway Energy Group has a 30-gigawatt pipeline of renewable energy and gas projects — and senior executives told Latitude Media and investors that Clearway is actively looking to leverage that portfolio to build large campuses for data centers that need power fast. Jeffries analysts recently described it as “the most under-appreciated glow up” in the energy market, arguing that investors are undervaluing both the company’s growth story and relationships with hyperscalers like Google and Microsoft.
Valerie Wooley, Clearway’s senior vice president of origination, told Latitude Media that the company’s transition into gigawatt-scale campuses marks a new phase in the company’s typical development playbook. While Clearway will continue to build individual utility-scale projects that are connected to the grid, the company is also exploring building complexes that are behind the meter — at least at first, until the grid is less congested.
“They want grid reliability,” Wooley said of Clearway’s hyperscaler customers. “They just don’t want to be delayed because of the time to get through interconnection and transmission queues. So if there’s a bridge, where we can build behind the meter to service the data center, but then eventually bring that load to the grid, I think that’s where you’ll see things happening and ultimately get to a better, more resilient grid.”
Hyperscalers including AWS have been explicit about their preference to be grid-tied, but in the last year, it has become clear that speed to power is the number one priority for most large loads competing to secure electrons as the race for artificial intelligence heats up.
Gigawatt-scale campuses
So far Clearway has primarily developed front-of-meter projects. However, the company aims to join the ranks of companies like NextEra Energy that are building massive power campuses for hyperscalers who want to avoid yearslong waits to hook up to the grid. While NextEra has historically developed front-of-meter energy projects, the company more recently has positioned itself as an all-of-the-above energy partner — gas, nuclear, and renewables — for customers including Google and Meta. The company said at its 2025 investor day in December that it anticipates building at least 15 gigawatts of new behind-the-meter data center hubs by 2035, with an upside of twice that.
Meanwhile, Crusoe Energy is a newcomer that is also pitching the behind-the-meter campus model. Crusoe is a partner in developing the 1.2-GW Stargate project in Abilene, Texas spearheaded by OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank. The first phase came online in 2025, with plans to expand in the coming years.
Wooley didn’t disclose how much of Clearway’s 30 GW pipeline is devoted to gas versus renewables. But Craig Cornelius, CEO of Clearway Energy Inc. (the publicly traded parent company that buys Clearway’s already-contracted assets) said in January that he sees a “mutually beneficial” relationship between gas and renewables. Together, they can dispatch at the optimal time to ensure reliability and low-costs for customers.
That said, during a Jeffries webinar last month, Cornelius suggested that renewables can meet the bulk of demand: “In general, what we see is that having about 70% of the megawatt-hours come from zero-marginal-cost renewable generators and about 30% of the MWh come from a combination of dispatch from battery facilities and dispatch from a gas facility tends to be a good formula for a least cost best fit, and it varies from one place to another.”
Cornelius added that the company has a “good cadence of collaboration” across the five major hyperscalers — widely known as Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle — as it expands into larger campuses. The companies are currently designing “contractual language” for those projects.
Google, Microsoft deals
So far, Clearway’s data center deals have been standard power purchase agreements with tech giants, utilities, and local governments.
Cornelius said he expects a “proliferation” of those front-of-the-meter contracts, in addition to the more ambitious behind-the-meter complexes that combine gas, battery storage, solar, and wind projects with “novel electrical interconnections between them.”
Last month, Clearway announced a PPA with Google totaling 1.17 GW of carbon-free energy projects in Missouri, Texas, and West Virginia. The projects are targeted to support Google’s data centers in regions like ERCOT and PJM for up to two decades, the companies said. Construction is scheduled to start this year, with the first sites expected to come online in 2027 and 2028.
Last April, Clearway also announced that Microsoft is buying power from a 335 megawatt wind farm under development in West Virginia, and is also building a nearly 200 MW energy storage system in Colorado under an agreement with a subsidiary with the utility Xcel Energy.
The projects have quick turnaround timelines, despite the shortage of energy equipment like transformers. Wooley said Clearway’s deal with Google had been in the works for a while and that the company has a strong supply network that’s allowed the company to accelerate some projects.
Clearway’s growth, combined with Google’s purchase of Intersect Power, has restored some confidence among investors that the data center build out is still tethered to renewable energy and not just gas, Julien Dumoulin-Smith, head of U.S. utilities & clean tech research at Jeffries, told Latitude Media.
“The entire market of clean energy stocks has traded up,” Dumoulin-Smith said. “You might ask, why is that? And I think there’s been a real pivot to understanding that the data center build is going to sponsor renewables.”
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