Key Takeaways

  • Players of popular video games such as NBA 2K26 and PGA Tour 2K25 are providing partial offtake support for a 110-megawatt standalone solar project in Hill County, Texas, that recently entered commercial operation. The arrangement was announced last week by two affiliated companies.
  • The voluntary subscription-based mechanism allows thousands of individual gamers to support a portion of the capacity of the ThreeW solar project south of Dallas, owned by Mitsui & Co., through virtual power purchase agreements (VPPAs). The facility is expected to generate 280,000 megawatt-hours of electricity annually, according to Ever.green and SuperPower.
  • Cris Eugster, founder and CEO of Ever.green, told Utility Dive in an interview that this unusual arrangement highlights the potential for VPPAs to expand beyond markets dominated by hyperscalers, utilities, and large corporations. Ever.green is the Seattle-based renewable energy trading platform that facilitated the deal.

Deep Dive

California-based SuperPower developed the subscription mechanism and claims to have secured the offtake rights. The company says 10 megawatts of solar power can offset approximately 125 million hours of gaming electricity annually. Modern gaming consoles consume significant electricity in users' homes, and online gaming also increases electricity demand from cloud data centers and other infrastructure.

"There are millions of gamers worldwide, and this group's energy consumption is quite substantial," Eugster said. "But people often overlook this sector."

Eugster, a former Texas utility executive, said Ever.green views the VPPA for the ThreeW project as "one of the earlier arrangements of its kind," but the structure itself is not revolutionary. Large, energy-intensive companies like Microsoft and Meta have the capacity to act as sole offtakers for VPPAs of hundreds of megawatts, but most companies do not need electricity on that scale, he added.

Eugster said Ever.green facilitates "split" deals for smaller-scale energy capacity or renewable energy certificates, which he called the company's "main business."

A VPPA is a contract for differences that transfers energy price risk from the project owner (seller) to the offtaker (buyer). In volatile wholesale energy markets like the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), VPPAs can offset development costs while reducing the project's market risk through predictable upfront contract revenue. Eugster noted that renewable energy certificates (RECs) also provide contract revenue to sellers but do not transfer energy risk to buyers.

Eugster also said that upfront contract revenue gives developers flexibility to adjust project design in a rapidly changing energy market. ERCOT is again a prime example: according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, the Texas grid already has nearly 30 gigawatt-hours (and growing) of storage capacity.

Eugster noted that the rapid deployment of batteries in recent years has dampened wholesale price volatility but has also posed challenges to the economics of some proposed storage projects.

With sufficient contract revenue, project developers may gain greater flexibility to design and schedule projects, he added—for example, advancing a solar-only phase first and planning to add storage in future phases.

Eugster said this approach also applies to other clean energy resources and energy markets beyond ERCOT. Ever.green has structured deals around a repowered wind farm in West Texas, a 28-megawatt solar plant in South Carolina backed by Wells Fargo, and a 3.2-megawatt solar procurement for a school district in West Virginia.

Similar to the gamer-supported VPPA, the West Texas wind farm deal—which Ever.green says nearly doubled its capacity—also included split commitments from smaller buyers. The company said the project's smallest individual contract was just 1,000 megawatt-hours per year.

"Every place has its uniqueness, but the common thread is that these projects need long-term offtake to support their development," Eugster said.