Thursday Aug. 11, 2016 www.bloombergbriefs.com Total Leads Oil Majors in Renewables Investments NUMBER OF THE WEEK BY EMILY CHASAN, BLOOMBERG BRIEFS Some big European oil producers are getting a taste for renewables as fossil fuel prices have declined. FOUR Total SA spent almost $9 billion since 2000 on clean and alternative energy investments, putting it in the lead spot among oil majors, according to a Bloomberg That's the number of Brazilian cities Intelligence analysis of public equity and debt purchases. that smashed new heat records in The French oil giant surpassed the $8.25 billion in clean energy deals spent by BP Plc 2015, according to a report released since 2000, the report said. Exxon Mobil Corp., on the other hand, hasn't made any Monday during the Olympic Games renewable acquisitions or financing deals during that time, though it does invest in the by the Observatorio do Clima. Brazil sector in other ways. Exxon spends about $1 billion annually on energy research on has heated up faster than the global technologies like carbon capture and sequestration and biofuels, which include a long- average, warming 1 degrees Celsius term project to create fuels from algae, spokesman Bill Holbrook said. (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) in the last Companies that underinvest in renewables could potentially be exposed to future 54 years. That pace could make it too shifts in fossil-fuel demand, Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Gregory Elders said. hot to play similar Olympic games by "Waiting until the transition has already happened may prove too late, as many U.S. the end of the decade, the group coal companies have found, winding up in bankruptcy," he said. said. Total's Renewable Deals Soar Oil demand may decline as electric vehicle sales grow. While natural gas has QUOTE OF THE WEEK seen demand rise recently, its use as an electricity “Solar and batteries go source could peak by 2026 together like peanut butter as renewables are and jelly.” increasingly available and — Tesla Motors Inc. chairman Elon Musk, cheap, according to in comments on a conference call Tuesday. Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Global investment INSIDE Note: Renewables acquisitions or financing. Excludes in clean energy totaled divestments; Total SA includes deals by SunPower after 2011 $116.4 billion in the first half of 2016, according to BNEF. Q&A: Facebook Inc. aims to power Total's investment in clean energy has surged since its $1.38 billion deal in 2011 for all of its data centers with 100 60 percent of U.S. solar panel maker SunPower Corp. It's aiming to have low carbon percent clean energy, said Bill businesses make up around 20 percent of its portfolio in 20 years, a spokesman said. Weihl, director of sustainability at the Meanwhile, after investing more than $8 billion, BP has slowed new investment in social media company. renewables in the past three years. The company, which is still recovering from the CHARTS: Hundreds of new ESG costs of its 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, said in its 2016 annual energy outlook indexes launched in the past decade that it expects renewables to be the fastest growing fuel at least through 2035. reflect improved ESG disclosure. See BP's interests in renewable energies are now focused on two material businesses — which regions are most represented. onshore wind power generation in the U.S. and sugarcane-to-bioethanol production in GUNS: A group formed days after Brazil, according to company spokesman David Nicholas. the June massacre at a gay nightclub Statoil ASA ranked third among its peers with $3 billion of public renewables in Orlando will target BlackRock Inc. investments since 2000. The company has accelerated investment since 2014, the to kick off a campaign pressuring analysis showed. Royal Dutch Shell Plc, which has lagged its European rivals, companies to cut ties with the announced a "New Energies" plan in May aimed at boosting investment in wind and firearms industry. solar, saying in an internal memo at the time that it sees "potential for material scale and upside." Shell currently has $1.7 billion invested in biofuels, wind, solar, commercial ACTIVISTS: Activist investors ran hydrogen and other projects, the company said. fewer campaigns in 2016. Chevron Corp. has invested about $1 billion invested in public renewable deals since COMMENTARY: Vivint Solar's 2000, the analysis showed. Chevron didn't respond to a request for comment. good day more flare than star as "Making relatively small investments now in renewable energy may prove a hedge rooftop solar competition intensifies. against a faster than expected clean energy shift," Elders said. — With assistance from Siobhan Wagner, Bloomberg Briefs Q&A: FACEBOOK Aug. 11, 2016 Bloomberg Brief Sustainable Finance 2 Q&A: FACEBOOK Data's CO2 Footprint Has Expanded But Efficiency Has Improved as Billions Surf Web has not been borne out because there's energy and greening that grid in the In a little over a decade, been a lot of attention paid to efficiency. process. Facebook Inc. has grown A lot of the efficiency gains that we've from a niche online portal seen over the last decade have come Q: Could you ever envision an for college student about initially because a few very large offshoot like Facebook Energy? networking to a global scale companies like us and Google, A: I think the short answer is not really. social media website with Microsoft and Amazon were focusing on Look at companies that established such more than a billion daily making our own operations more subsidiaries: Google and Apple. I was active users. As demand to efficient. Then they basically began to actually at Google for six years and was use Facebook's site and its collaborate because we can do much part of the team that did that. At least so other products like more much faster by working together. far the focus for them has been on Source: Facebook Instagram has grown, the The Open Compute Project is one getting the ability to trade in the company has needed to example that has helped drive much wholesale market, because it simplifies build more power-hungry data centers. Thirty-five higher levels of efficiency in the industry. doing some of these long-term deals. It's percent of energy going into Facebook data not because they want an energy centers in 2015 was from renewable sources, and Q: One reason Facebook said it division. It's because they want to be one day the company will power all of its data decided to build a data center in Iowa able to do deals in a way that you can't if centers with 100 percent clean energy, said Bill a few years ago was because it you're only a retail participant. It is hard Weihl, director of sustainability. He spoke with wanted to have the ability to directly in some places to enter into the kinds of Bloomberg Briefs' Siobhan Wagner. This access clean energy from a nearby contracts or do the kinds of deals we interview has been edited and condensed. wind farm. How important is local need to do to buy clean energy. We're access to renewable energy in working with others to open up the deciding where to put your next data market to improve access to renewable Q: Why are data centers so energy center? energy so it's easier for people, including intensive? A: Access to clean energy is one of the us, to do these kinds of deals. That A: If you think about what we do or what key criteria we use when choosing where means getting new policies in place that other large-scale internet companies do, to put a data center. It's not the only one. enable companies like us or others to we serve over a billion and a half people There are dozens, if not hundreds, of come into a state like Iowa and have a every month. They spend a lot of time criteria that go into picking a site. And tariff on the menu that allows you to do using our products and what they do one of the criteria is that energy should what we did but with much less requires a fair amount of computation. be reasonably cheap because these are negotiation because all the framework is We have many thousands of computers energy-intensive facilities and we don't in place. housed in these big data centers, and want to spend lots and lots of money on every one of those computers takes energy. From a business perspective, we Q: Ready for an odd question? Do energy. The amount that we use in need to manage that cost. But we also some Facebook features come with a aggregate is quite large but per person is want it to be clean, and so we are much higher CO2 footprint than others? Can quite small. less likely to site a facility in a place that I slightly cut my CO2 footprint by just makes it really difficult for us to get 'liking' photos instead of leaving a Q: Some studies show data center access to cost effective clean energy. comment? emissions are starting to rival Part of what drew us to Iowa was the A: It's certainly the case that doing things emissions from the airline industry. fact that Iowa has a great wind resource. that are very simple like just 'liking' A: It's still nothing compared to transport We were able to work with the [local] something involves much less generally, it's nothing compared to utility to develop a deal that allowed us to computation behind the scenes in our industry, it's nothing compared to buy energy from them from a new wind data centers, so it likely has a less buildings.