Google’s Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President of Technical Infrastructure, recently posted on the Google blog that they had purchased enough renewable energy to match what the company had spent on electricity in 2017. Google, being one of the largest and most powerful companies in the world, has not yet been able to fully ‘power’ their services and facilities using renewable energy, so instead they made their goal for 2017 to ‘match’ their energy usage with their renewable energy purchase. This means that for every kilowatt of energy that they consume, they purchase another kilowatt on another grid.
They are the first public Cloud to be successful in this kind of dedication, buying more renewable energy than any other corporation. Their renewable energy contracts have thus far produced $3 billion internationally in new capital investments and they have new contracts that intend to purchase “3 gigawatts of output from renewable energy projects.” In 2016, Google matched their energy consumption with renewables by 57%, but more importantly signed a record number of contracts to build and develop more renewable energy centers.
From the minute these contracts are signed it usually takes a year or two to build the solar or wind farm that will produce this cleaner energy. Most of the operations that Google signed for in 2016 were up and running in 2017, which was a major contributing factor to Google’s ability to break energy records last year.
Even though Google is not able to fully support their facilities using renewable energy, their dedication to adding cleaner energy to the electric system is clear, as they are helping to produce clean energy in other areas at different times by buying as much energy as they are consuming—only cleaner.
If you enjoyed this article and want to receive more valuable industry content like this, click here to sign up for our digital newsletters!
Leave a Reply