Fortum hangs the undecided €800m of its Loviisa extension on a 20-year Google offtake

Eighty percent of a roughly €1bn programme is about €800m, and that is the share of the Loviisa lifetime extension Fortum says is still pending investment decisions ^[7][19]. Google's 22-year contract does not pay that bill. It gives whoever writes those investment papers a named buyer for half the plant's output for 20 consecutive years ^[2][20].

Half of Loviisa is about 507MW, since each of the two VVER-440 units is rated at 507MW ^[4][18]. The term begins in 2028 at a smaller volume, so there is a two-year ramp before the 50 percent share runs from 2030 through 2049 ^[3][20]. Fortum's stated position is that the PPA is expected to provide the revenue certainty needed to continue investments associated with a 100 percent lifetime extension, and to enable a 10MW capacity increase on top of an already planned 38MW uprate due live in 2028 ^[8]. Those uprates add 48MW between them, under 5 percent of nameplate ^[22]. The contract buys calendar time on roughly a gigawatt of existing plant.

Google frames this as clean firm power for AI in Europe. Aris Karcanias, Google's EMEA energy director, says the company is doing its part to keep a critical energy source on the grid near its Hamina data centre, mitigating system impacts from meaningful capacity going offline in the south of the country, and that he hopes it becomes a blueprint for responsible integration of AI into European energy systems ^[13]. Underneath that framing, what has actually happened is more specific: a state-owned utility ^[16] has swapped two decades of merchant price exposure on half of a plant commissioned in 1970 for the certainty it needs to approve the rest of the extension spend, and its customer now has a Finnish supply plan resting on reactors it does not operate.

The reported terms carry no price, and no volume figure for 2028 and 2029 ^[21]. Without those, an outside reader cannot tell whether Google paid a premium for certainty or bought cheap baseload and got the extension as a by-product. Fortum's own wording stays conditional too: it describes the PPA as expected to provide the revenue certainty needed, which describes an expectation, not a decision already taken on the remaining capex ^[8].

A long contract that keeps a supplier's asset alive comes down to two things: whether the asset would exist without the contract, and whether the output can be replaced locally if it never arrives. Loviisa sits where the answer to the first is no, on Fortum's own account of its pending capex, and the answer to the second is constrained by Google's stated worry about capacity leaving southern Finland ^[7][13]. In that quadrant the buyer is the financier, and price is the smallest of the things that belong in the document: capex milestones, and a defined outcome if the investment decision never clears. Whether Google's contract carries either of those is not in the public account ^[21].