Meta drops out of a major clean energy pact as its natural gas buildout accelerates
Over the past year, Meta has funded the 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. Now, Meta is no longer part of the RE100, a corporate renewable energy initiative, after a decade of membership, the company confirmed to TechCrunch today. The breakup was mutual, according to a Meta spokesperson.
- ▪Over the past year, Meta has funded the 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.
- ▪Now, Meta is no longer part of the RE100, a corporate renewable energy initiative, after a decade of membership, the company confirmed to TechCrunch today.
- ▪The breakup was mutual, according to a Meta spokesperson.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/23/meta-drops-out-of-a-major-clean-energy-pact-as-its-natural-gas-buildout-accelerates/ |
| Publication time | Thu, 23 Jul 2026 19:41:54 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-23T20:11:52.789Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-23T20:11:52.789Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | o5tW6LZcP_ah |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Over the past year, Meta has funded the 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. Now, Meta is no longer part of the RE100, a corporate renewable energy initiative, after a decade of membership, the company confirmed to TechCrunch today. The breakup was mutual, according to a Meta spokesperson. The exit caps months of Meta expanding its bet on fossil fuels to power its AI data centers and begs the obvious question: What does “clean energy” actually mean to a company that keeps building gas plants while still calling itself renewable? RE100 is a project of the Climate Group, a UK-headquartered nonprofit co-founded by former Prime Minister…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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