Company ... Google
Energy / Renewables

Google Announces Plans to Run Entirely on Renewable Energy

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Google Announces Plans to Run Entirely on Renewable Energy Greenpeace Greenpeace

Google announced today that it has reached 2.6 GW of renewable energy purchased, putting the company on pace to reach 100 percent renewable energy in 2017. In its announcement, the company noted that renewable energy has both managed its carbon footprint and been good for business as the lowest cost option.

Google has been a catalyst in the dramatic growth in renewable energy procurement among corporations, redefining the art of the possible by bringing significant renewable energy projects onto the same grid its data centers are powered from. Google's milestone of 2.6 GW of renewable energy purchased puts it well above what most corporations have done to drive renewable growth.

As Google itself acknowledges, its effort to become 100 percent renewably powered remains a work in progress due to the limited renewable energy options offered by monopoly utilities. The company rightly highlights the need to change government policies to drive investment and create new pathways that will allow all of their operations to be directly powered by renewables. Google and other IT leaders like Apple and Facebook have increasingly used their influence to open previously closed markets to allow for more access to renewables.

Google has put its money where its mouth is on renewable energy over the past six years, repeatedly showing that renewables are not only good for the climate, but good for business. More than ever, companies must show this sort of leadership on renewable energy. Now is not the time to be silent. Corporations have helped drive growth during the Obama administration, but given the hostility to climate change and renewable energy policies by the incoming Trump Administration, companies that have made commitments to power their operations with renewable energy need to speak up on the critical importance of strengthening renewable energy policies as Google has done today.

Greenpeace will release its latest Clicking Clean report, assessing the performance of Google, Apple, Amazon and other internet companies on their use of renewable energy, on Jan. 10, 2017.

Every year people search on Google trillions of times; every minute people upload more than 400 hours of YouTube videos. All of that takes an incredible amount of processing power — which means energy. Our engineers have spent years perfecting Google's data centers, making them 50 percent more energy efficient than the industry average. But we still need a lot of energy to power the products and services that our users depend on. We began purchasing renewable energy to reduce our carbon footprint and address climate change — but it also makes business sense. I’m thrilled to announce that in 2017 Google will reach 100% renewable energy for our global operations — including both our data centers and offices. We were one of the first corporations to create large-scale, long-term contracts to buy renewable energy directly; we signed our first agreement to purchase all the electricity from a 114-megawatt wind farm in Iowa, in 2010. Today, we are the world’s largest corporate buyer of renewable power, with commitments reaching 2.6 gigawatts (2,600 megawatts) of wind and solar energy. That’s bigger than many large utilities and more than twice as much as the 1.21 gigawatts it took to send Marty McFly back to the future.

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To reach this goal we’ll be directly buying enough wind and solar electricity annually to account for every unit of electricity our operations consume, globally. And we're focusing on creating new energy from renewable sources, so we only buy from projects that are funded by our purchases.

Over the last six years, the cost of wind and solar came down 60 percent and 80 percent, respectively, proving that renewables are increasingly becoming the lowest cost option. Electricity costs are one of the largest components of our operating expenses at our data centers, and having a long-term stable cost of renewable power provides protection against price swings in energy.

Our 20 renewable energy projects also help support communities, from Grady County, OK, to Rutherford County, NC, to the Atacama Region of Chile to municipalities in Sweden. To date, our purchasing commitments will result in infrastructure investments of more than $3.5 billion globally, about two-thirds of that in the United States. These projects also generate tens of millions of dollars per year in revenue to local property owners, and tens of millions more to local and national governments in tax revenue.

So, we’re on track to match our global energy consumption on an annual basis by next year. But this is just the first step. As we look to the immediate future, we’ll continue to pursue these direct contracts as we grow, with an even greater focus on regional renewable energy purchases in places where we have data centers and significant operations. Since the wind doesn’t blow 24 hours a day, we’ll also broaden our purchases to a variety of energy sources that can enable renewable power, every hour of every day. Our ultimate goal is to create a world where everyone — not just Google — has access to clean energy. For more on these next steps, read our white paper.

google_ppa.jpg How Google purchases and uses renewable energy.

Operating our business in an environmentally sustainable way has been a core value from the beginning, and we’re always working on new ideas to make sustainability a reality — like enabling the building of healthy workplaces and creating a living, breathing dashboard for the planet. We’ve reported our carbon footprint and published information on our sustainability programs for many years in white papers, blog posts, and on our website. Now, we’ve put all this information together in a new Environmental Report. You can also check out our new environment website, where we share stories of how we are finding new ways to do more while using less. Most of our on-campus sustainability initiatives were started by a few passionate Googlers, and have now grown into company-wide efforts. From the solar panels on our roofs to our bike-to-work program, these initiatives sit at the heart of our company culture and help both us and our users reduce our impact on the environment. economic impact Google is the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy in the world. The science tells us that tackling climate change is an urgent global priority. We believe the private sector, in partnership with policy leaders, must take bold steps and that we can do so in a way that leads to growth and opportunity. And we have a responsibility to do so — to our users and the environment. We have lots of progress left to make, but these achievements we're announcing today feel like a breath of fresh air. Now, back to work. POSTED IN: ENVIRONMENT GOOGLE CLOUD GOOGLE IN EUROPE GOOGLE EARTH Up next