Mitsui's 110 MW ThreeW solar project in Texas draws gamer-backed VPPA offtake via SuperPower and Ever.green

Mitsui & Co.'s 110 MW ThreeW Solar Project in Hill County, Texas, has begun commercial operations, with a portion of its offtake backed by thousands of individual video game subscribers - an arrangement that tests whether consumer-aggregated demand can meaningfully underwrite utility-scale clean energy projects.^[1]

How the structure works

SuperPower, a San Francisco-based platform operated by CleanPlay Inc., collects subscription revenue from players of titles including NBA 2K26 and PGA Tour 2K25, then pools that revenue into a virtual power purchase agreement for capacity at the ThreeW site. Ever.green, a Seattle-based clean energy marketplace, facilitated the transaction.

A VPPA is a contract for difference: the offtaker guarantees the developer a fixed price, absorbing the spread when wholesale prices fall below that level and receiving the difference when they rise above it. The offtaker receives renewable energy certificates but not physical power. In volatile wholesale markets like ERCOT, that contracted revenue can both offset development costs and reduce a project's market risk, according to Cris Eugster, founder and CEO of Ever.green and a former Texas utility executive.^[1]

The key innovation here is scale of participation. Traditional VPPAs typically carry minimum load requirements of 100,000 MWh per year or more and contract lengths of 15-20 years, limiting access to hyperscalers and large corporates.^[1] Ever.green's fractionalized model sets the minimum at 1,000 MWh per year, low enough for aggregated consumer communities to participate.^[1]

The gaming energy rationale

SuperPower's pitch rests on the energy intensity of gaming. The company estimates that 10 MW of solar capacity can offset approximately 125 million hours of gaming per year, accounting for console draw and the cloud infrastructure behind networked play.

The ThreeW project is expected to generate approximately 280,000 MWh of clean electricity annually.

Ever.green's prior transactions

The ThreeW deal is not Ever.green's first fractionalized transaction. Eugster told Utility Dive the company has structured similar arrangements across several projects:

• A repowered wind farm in West Texas, where fractional commitments from small buyers were part of the deal
• A 28 MW solar farm in South Carolina backed in part by Wells Fargo
• A 3.2 MW solar procurement by a West Virginia school district^[1]

The smallest individual contract in these transactions has been 1,000 MWh annually.^[1] Eugster described fractionalized VPPA and REC transactions as Ever.green's "main offering."^[1]

What to watch

The practical question for project developers is whether consumer-aggregated offtake can be relied upon at scale - and whether it holds up over the multi-year contract periods that project finance requires. SuperPower has signalled ThreeW is the first of multiple planned transactions. Whether lenders treat aggregated consumer commitments as bankable offtake on the same terms as a corporate VPPA will determine how far the model travels.