Google is close to its goal of completely running off renewable energy; they believe they’ll hit it by next year. Google is turning to wind and solar power to help run its facilities (via Google)
Tech giant Google may be at the forefront of technological innovations, but they’ve also done their part to stay friendly to the environment. They set out a goal to run most of their business on renewable energy. Now, it seems like they’re close to their goal of running all of its data centers and offices on solar or wind power in 2017. To help them reach this goal, the company is planning to increase its green efforts. They’ll directly buy enough wind and solar electricity each year to make up for every unit their operations eat up globally. They also want to make new energy from renewable sources and plan to do this via buying projects funded by their own purchases. Now, anyone interested in their efforts can keep up with a newly published Environmental Report and dedicated environmental website that shows how well it’s doing.
To give you an idea, last year Google used 5.7 terawatt-hours of electricity. That’s enough to power two 140,000 person towns. The company not only believes this plan will help the environment, but it helps them out financially as well. As Google pointed out in a blog post, the cost of wind and solar energy has come down over the years, roughly by 60 and 80 percent respectively. These prices are more stable than carbon based sources, such as coal, and they’re quickly proving to be the cheapest option. It should also help them set fixed-price contracts for power in certain areas. Their green efforts will also work towards supporting communities, like Grady County, OK and Rutherford County, NC, according to Google. Their current green projects help generate millions of dollars per year in revenue to local property owners.
Google is currently working with various wind farms, including Mico-II, located 50 miles outside Oklahoma City. The 50,000 acre facility is operated by NextEra Energy Resources, which is the largest operator of wind and solar generating sites in the States. Currently, Google uses all the 64 turbines housed at Mico-II. This generates 438,000 megawatts hours of electricity a year, enough to power 30,000 homes. Adding more wind sources to the company’s offices will not only be resourceful, but efficient as well. With an improvement to how the data centers use the amount of power they consume, Google’s energy consumption can be lowered and they can get more out of the same amount of power.
Of course, not the first company to attempt to run only on renewable sources. Facebook recently made similar deals with wind producers and Amazon announced five more solar projects to solidify their commitment to running their machines entirely with renewable energy. Microsoft has actually been 100 percent carbon neutral since 2014, but this is the result of buying carbon offsets. These are investments in renewable projects that’s supposed to compensate for the fossil fuels the company eats up. Still, they want to supply half of their electric power from wind, solar, and hydroelectric sources by 2018.
Maybe Google should adopt my 100% Zombie renewable energy plan.
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