Meta exits RE100 renewable pact amid natural gas buildout

Meta has left RE100, the corporate renewable-energy initiative it had belonged to for a decade, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. The breakup was mutual, according to a Meta spokesperson. RE100 is a project of the Climate Group, a UK-headquartered nonprofit that provides policy and technical support to companies working toward 100% renewable energy; Meta competitors Apple, Google, and Microsoft remain among the group’s 444 members. Recharge News first reported Meta’s departure.

The exit lands in the middle of Meta’s expanding bet on natural gas to power its AI data centers. Over the past year, the company has funded construction of at least a dozen natural gas power plants, including one project alone that will burn enough natural gas to generate as much electricity as the entire state of South Dakota uses. Meta’s first move was a 200-megawatt behind-the-meter gas plant in Ohio, announced in June of last year, to supply one of its data centers. Two months later, the company said it would build three large natural gas power plants in Louisiana to power its Hyperion data center; in April, it added seven more plants to the same project, bringing the total to 10 power plants generating a combined 7.5 gigawatts — enough to power South Dakota and then some.

Neither Meta nor the Climate Group would say why the split happened, but the nonprofit recently tightened its guidance, enforcing more rigorous reporting on progress toward renewable-energy goals. Meta had previously told RE100 it aimed to run its entire operations on renewable electricity by 2020. A Meta spokesperson said the company remains committed to matching its data center electricity usage “with 100% clean and renewable energy” — a claim it can still make by purchasing environmental attribute certificates, such as funding a solar farm in Arizona to offset a data center in Ohio, as long as the farm generates as much power in a year as the data center consumes. Most companies use this kind of annual matching; some, including Microsoft, match usage hourly instead — a more stringent approach that aligns power production more closely with actual demand and favors pairing renewables with batteries, like Google did in Minnesota earlier this year, over gas plants like the ones powering Hyperion.

A single 1-gigawatt data center running 24/7 on natural gas releases 438 metric tons of nitrogen oxides, 149 metric tons of fine particulate matter, 61 metric tons of sulfur oxides, and 298 metric tons of carbon monoxide — pollutants linked to asthma, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and dementia, among other conditions.

Why it matters

Meta isn’t alone — Google and Microsoft have also invested in large fossil fuel projects for their AI infrastructure — but Meta has placed the biggest bet, and exiting a voluntary renewable-energy pact in the middle of that buildout raises the question of what “100% clean and renewable” claims are worth once AI compute demand collides with grid reality.