Thousands of individual video game enthusiasts playing titles like NBA 2K26 and PGA Tour 2K25 have helped provide offtake for a 110-megawatt solar facility that recently started commercial operations in Hill County, Texas, according to Ever.green and SuperPower, two of the companies behind the arrangement. The players participated through a voluntary, subscription-based offering that allowed them to support a virtual power purchase agreement for capacity at Mitsui & Co.'s ThreeW solar project located south of Dallas. The unusual structure highlights the possibility for wider VPPA adoption beyond the hyperscalers, utilities, and large corporations that currently dominate the market.
The ThreeW solar facility is projected to generate 280,000 megawatt-hours of energy each year, according to the companies. SuperPower, the California-based firm that developed the subscription offering and claimed the offtake, estimates that 10 MW of solar can offset roughly 125 million hours of gaming annually. Modern gaming consoles consume substantial electricity from users' homes, while network-based games create additional power demand from cloud data centers and related infrastructure. In a separate transaction involving a West Texas wind farm, Ever.green structured fractional commitments from small buyers that nearly doubled the facility's capacity, with the smallest contract covering just 1,000 MWh per year.
"There's a lot of gamers out there, millions of them, and it's pretty energy intensive," Cris Eugster, founder and CEO of Seattle-based renewable energy marketplace Ever.green, told Utility Dive. Eugster, a former Texas utility executive, said Ever.green believes the ThreeW VPPA is "one of" the first arrangements of its kind, though the structure itself isn't revolutionary. While power-hungry companies like Microsoft and Meta have the resources to serve as sole VPPA offtakers for hundreds of megawatts at once, most companies don't require that much capacity, he noted. Ever.green facilitates "fractionalized" transactions for smaller amounts of energy capacity or renewable energy certificates, which Eugster described as the company's "main offering."
The arrangement works because VPPAs and renewable energy certificates provide upfront contracted revenue that gives developers flexibility to shape their projects in fast-changing energy markets, according to Eugster. In volatile wholesale markets like the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, these contracts can both offset development costs and reduce projects' market risk by delivering predictable revenue from the start. Texas has nearly 30 gigawatt-hours of energy storage on its grid, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, and the rapid battery buildout has dampened wholesale price volatility in recent years while challenging the economics of some proposed storage projects. With sufficient contracted revenue, project developers gain more flexibility to design and pace projects—for instance, by moving forward with a solar-only first phase with plans to add storage later.
Ever.green has structured similar transactions around a repowered wind farm in West Texas, a 28-MW solar farm backed by Wells Fargo in South Carolina, and a 3.2-MW solar procurement by a West Virginia school district, among other projects. The approach functions for other clean energy resources and in energy markets beyond ERCOT, Eugster said. "Every place is unique and different, but what is common is those projects need long-term offtake to help stand up," he told Utility Dive.