IN Brief:
- Google will contract up to 50% of Loviisa nuclear capacity during the plant's extended operating period.
- Fortum's roughly €1 billion lifetime-extension programme includes a planned 38MW uprate and a possible additional 10MW increase.
- The wider partnership includes a 94MW battery at Kajaani and work on potential new generation and flexibility capacity.
Fortum and Google have signed a 22-year power purchase agreement covering up to half of the capacity of Finland’s Loviisa nuclear power plant during its extended operating life, providing a long-term commercial basis for continued investment in the two-unit station through 2050.
The agreement begins in 2028 at a lower contracted level and is due to reach 50% of Loviisa’s capacity from 2030 through 2049. Fortum says the contract provides revenue certainty for the continuing lifetime-extension programme as Google increases its Finnish data-centre footprint and associated electricity demand.
Loviisa’s two pressurised-water reactors were commissioned in 1977 and 1980 and each have an electrical capacity of 507MWe. Together they generate about 8TWh annually, equivalent to roughly 10% of Finland’s electricity production, while their original operating horizons would have ended in 2027 and 2030.
Keeping the units available through 2050 requires an extensive programme of plant renewal and modification. Fortum estimates investment connected with continued operation and lifetime extension at approximately €1 billion between 2023 and 2050, with around €700 million of capital expenditure and roughly 80% of the individual projects required for the full period still awaiting separate investment decisions.
The PPA does not remove those project-level decisions, but it gives Fortum a contracted customer for a substantial part of the plant’s output over the extended period. Once 50% of Loviisa’s generation capacity is contracted, Fortum expects the agreement to increase group comparable return on net assets by approximately 1.4 percentage points over time.
Additional generating capacity is also planned. A previously announced 38MW uprate is expected to enter service in 2028, and Fortum says the Google agreement should enable a further 10MW increase. Those additions are modest compared with the existing 1,014MWe station, but uprating an operating nuclear plant can add firm output without constructing an entirely new generating site.
The commercial relationship extends beyond Loviisa. Google has announced €13 billion of investment in Finland during 2027 and 2028, including data centres and supporting infrastructure in Hamina, Muhos, Vaala, and Kajaani. Loviisa is about 55km from Google’s Hamina data centre, placing a large block of growing digital demand relatively close to an established source of firm generation in southern Finland.
Fortum will also optimise a new 94MW battery storage system contracted by Google next to its planned Kajaani data centre. The battery introduces a shorter-timescale flexibility asset alongside a power agreement measured in decades, allowing stored energy and controllable demand to be managed around a large computing load while the nuclear plant provides sustained generation.
The companies have separately signed a memorandum of understanding covering possible new nuclear capacity, renewable generation, flexibility assets, and energy portfolio-management services. Fortum has an 8GW Nordic renewable pipeline in permitting and is targeting 1.2GW of ready-to-build renewables and 2.5GW of new flexibility services and generation assets in a ready-to-deploy state by the end of 2028.
New nuclear remains exploratory rather than committed. Fortum and Google intend to assess business models that could improve the competitiveness of additional reactors at Loviisa, while also examining whether Fortum-owned powered land could support future Google data-centre development. Any new reactor would require its own financing, licensing, engineering, and investment decisions.
The immediate delivery challenge remains the existing station. Fortum must complete the outstanding lifetime-extension projects, deliver the scheduled 38MW uprate, assess the further 10MW increase, and maintain plant reliability across another two decades of operation. A long-term buyer strengthens the commercial case, but it does not shorten the engineering programme required to keep ageing nuclear assets available.
The arrangement also concentrates more of Google’s Finnish power strategy around assets whose operating characteristics differ substantially. Nuclear generation provides steady output over long periods, while the battery can respond over much shorter intervals and portfolio management can shape exposure to variable renewable production. That combination gives the parties several engineering levers for matching a large, relatively continuous computing load without treating every megawatt of demand as identical.
For the wider Finnish system, the significance will depend on how much new load Google’s programme eventually brings online and how quickly supporting generation and flexibility follow. Large data-centre connections can alter local network requirements even when national generation is adequate, making the timing of connections, reinforcement, storage, and contracted supply as important as the headline annual energy volume.
The first contracted electricity is scheduled for 2028, with the PPA reaching its planned 50% share from 2030. By that point Google’s Finnish expansion and the Kajaani battery should add further demand and flexibility to a system in which Loviisa remains one of the country’s largest sources of continuous low-carbon generation.
