Google To Switch To Green Energy Entirely In 2017

Last year, Google consumed as much energy as the city of San Francisco. The online giant said on 6 December that all of its data centers around the world will be entirely powered with renewable energy sources sometime next year. This is not to say that Google computers will consume nothing but wind and solar power. Google gets electricity from a power company, which operates an energy grid supplied by hydroelectric dams, natural gas, and coal and wind power. Over the last decade, Google has made deals with renewable producers, guaranteeing to buy the energy they produce with their wind turbines and solar cells. With those guarantees, companies can obtain bank financing to build more turbines. The power created by the renewable is plugged into the utility grid, so that Google’s usage presents no net consumption of fossil fuels and the pool of electricity gets a larger share of renewable sources. Unlike carbon based power wind supply prices do not fluctuate. The more renewable energy it buys, the cheaper those sources get. About 25% of USs’ electricity goes to businesses, and companies like Google are now about 2 percentage points of that. Google operates eight businesses and runs on 13 data centers. The 5.7 terawatt hours of electricity Google consumed in 2015 is equal to output of two 500 megawatt coal plants. That is enough for 140,000 person towns.