Green Blog
A better web. Better for the environment.
Celebrating Arbor Day with Save the Redwoods League and Google Earth
4/29/11
From time to time we invite guests to post about topics of interest and we’re pleased to have Emily Limm join us for U.S. Arbor Day. Emily is the science director for the non-profit
Save the Redwoods League
and is studying the impact of climate change on the redwood forests of northern California. To raise awareness about the League’s research, she worked with
Google Earth Outreach
to model old-growth redwoods on
Google Earth
. In this post, Emily shares her ideas on how technology and citizen science can help scientific research. -Ed.
Today is U.S. Arbor Day, a holiday established 120 years ago to celebrate our often under-appreciated forests, which provide us with necessities like clean air and drinking water as well as small pleasures like shade for a summer’s day picnic or a beautiful place to hike with crunchy leaves underfoot. Arbor Day holds special meaning for me because I spend most of my time in the
coastal redwood forests
of California, working to protect the world’s tallest tree species.
Over the past few months,
Save the Redwoods League
and the
Google Earth Outreach team
have collaborated to create 3D models of the old-growth redwood forest in
Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park
in northern California, so you can now take a virtual hike among the ancient trees and cruise over towering treetops. Explore the park by activating the 3D trees layer in Earth (under 3D Buildings) and searching for [jedediah smith redwoods state park, ca]. Tilt your view angle toward the horizon to make the trees appear. You can
download
the KML file for the narrated tour about redwoods to view in Google Earth, or watch the video version below:
In order to protect redwoods in Jedediah Smith and elsewhere, my colleagues and I are working to collect data on geographic regions where the trees are currently thriving to determine how future forests will fare in our changing climate. A critical piece of our work is collecting and comparing field observations of redwoods across different climates, but we need more data to draw strong conclusions—and that’s where you come in.
Today, Save the Redwoods League is launching our citizen science project
Redwood Watch
, powered by
iNaturalist.org
, a platform for recording, organizing and mapping nature observations. By sharing a simple digital photograph of a redwood tree and the time and location where the picture was taken, you can help the League track and monitor the species. If you know of a redwood tree—perhaps in your own backyard or in
a nearby park
—you can use the free Redwood Watch iPhone application or your own camera to take a photo, add a comment and
submit it online
. iNaturalist stores your observation and, if geographical coordinates weren’t captured automatically, uses the
Google Maps APIs
to assign them to your photo. With your geolocated observation, we can zoom out and analyze your observation in the context of global environmental and climatic patterns.
An observation of a coast redwood submitted to the Redwood Watch on iNaturalist.org.
The more field observations Save the Redwoods League collects, the better we’ll understand what climate makes a healthy redwood today, and predict where the redwood forests of tomorrow will thrive. We hope to see you on the Redwood Watch.
Happy Arbor Day from Save the Redwoods League and Google Earth!
Note: There are plenty of parallel projects going on around the world, so if you don’t live near redwoods, consider participating in one of the other iNaturalist.org citizen science projects.
Posted by Emily Limm, Ph.D., Director of Science and Planning, Save the Redwoods League
Celebrating Earth Day
4/22/11
Today, we’re celebrating Earth Day with an animated, interactive
doodle
on our homepage and events at Google offices around the world. At our headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., we’re holding an environmental fair for Googlers, complete with speakers and contests to strengthen Googlers’ green acumen, and a cookout using—what else—
parabolic solar cookers
(don’t worry, we’ll compost the leftovers).
Our campus garden in Mountain View
We’ve been carbon neutral since 2007 and—Earth Day or not—we’re always asking ourselves what we can do to make the world greener today than it was yesterday. This week, we launched a
new website
with many of the questions we’ve been asking over the years that have inspired our environmental initiatives. What can we do to
make renewable energy cheaper than coal
? How can we
run a data center using 50 percent less energy
? And what does it take to green our energy supply?
It’s questions like these that led us to install solar panels on our Mountain View campus in 2007—at the time, the largest corporate solar installation in the U.S. They’re also what made us decide to donate to Googlers’ favorite charities based on how often they self-power their commute, whether
by bike
or by pogo stick. We hope the
new website
helps you start asking bold questions that lead to innovative solutions to make the world a greener place.
In addition to our new site, we’ve had a busy few weeks continuing our green streak. We doubled down on greening our energy supply with our
second power purchase agreement
(PPA) in less than a year and made several new investments: at a solar photovoltaic plant in
Germany
(our first in Europe), and others in the largest
wind farm
and
solar project
in the world, bringing our total invested in clean energy to more than $350 million. While the investments won’t supply our operations with energy, we believe they make business sense and will spur development and deployment of compelling clean energy technologies.
This Earth Day, we’ll continue to ask ourselves what else we can do to bring us closer to true sustainability. We hope that you, and companies across the world, will be doing the same.
Posted by Bill Weihl, Green Enegy Czar
Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain
4/21/11
Rodgers and Hammerstein
weren’t kidding when they wrote what is now Oklahoma’s
official state song
. The gusts on the plains are fierce, which makes the Sooner State a great place to harness clean, renewable wind energy. Our commitment to greening our energy supply is also strong, which is why we’ve just signed a power purchase agreement (PPA) for wind energy—our second in less than a year—in Oklahoma.
The purchase is similar in size and structure to the agreement we signed last July for
wind energy in Iowa
, but this time we will be applying the power to our Mayes County, Okla. data center, which will be fully operational later this year. We’ve agreed to purchase all of the energy from NextEra Energy Resources’ Minco II wind facility in Oklahoma for the next 20 years, through Google Energy LLC, an entity that enables us to participate in the wholesale energy market. This 100.8 megawatt facility will be built as a direct result of our financial commitment and should be operational in late 2011.
We’ve
made the commitment
to be a carbon neutral company, and this purchase is part of our effort to minimize our impact on the environment. We’ve managed to reduce our energy consumption by over 50 percent by building
highly energy-efficient facilities
, but we know that efficiency alone isn’t enough to eliminate our carbon footprint. We’ve been exploring ways, such as this PPA, to reduce emissions further by increasing the amount of renewable energy we use to power our operations; we purchase
high-quality carbon offsets
for any remaining emissions.
If you’re interested in learning more about the whys and wherefores of our renewable energy purchases, we’ve just published a
white paper
(PDF) on the topic. Our hope is that by laying out our reasoning and methods we’ll make it easier for others in the industry to explore similar arrangements.
These purchases represent long-term, meaningful actions to reduce our carbon footprint and power our operations with clean electricity. Our infrastructure team will continue to seek similar opportunities globally as Google’s businesses continue to grow. As a company we hope that purchases like these, plus the additional $350 million we’ve invested in
renewable
energy
projects
, support the market and drive down the cost of clean energy. This will enable even more companies to invest in sustainable energy solutions.
Posted by Gary Demasi, Global Infrastructure team
Shepherding the wind
4/18/11
We recently invested approximately $100 million in the Shepherds Flat Wind Farm, anticipated to be the largest wind farm in the world. Shepherds Flat is currently under construction near windy Arlington, Ore., and when completed in 2012 will produce 845 MW of energy. That’s a lot of wind—enough to power more than 235,000 homes.
This project is exciting to us not only because of its size and scale, but also because it uses advanced technology. This will be the first commercial wind farm in the U.S. to deploy, at scale, turbines that use permanent magnet generators—tech-speak for evolutionary turbine technology that will improve efficiency, reliability and grid connection capabilities. Though the technology has been installed outside the U.S., it’s an important, incremental step in lowering the cost of wind energy over the long term in the U.S.
Shepherds Flat will help Oregon continue to be one of the top wind producing states in the nation, while providing significant direct economic benefits to the state. The project will also benefit the region by helping California meet its aggressive renewable energy goals with a cost-effective and clean wind resource. The electricity produced at Shepherds Flat will be sold under long term agreements to Southern California Edison.
The Shepherds Flat Wind Farm under construction with me in the center and my colleagues Arielle Bertman and Matthew Stepka.
We look forward to joining a project with strong experienced partners such as the developer,
Caithness Energy
, and
GE
, which is an early investor in Shepherds Flat as well as the turbine manufacturer and operations and maintenance supplier. Our co-investors are
Sumitomo Corporation of America
, a subsidiary of Sumitomo Corporation, and
Tyr Energy
, a subsidiary of ITOCHU Corporation, both of which have deep experience in power projects.
This project brings our total invested in clean energy to more than $350 million, including our most recent investments in a
German solar photovoltaic plant
and in the
BrightSource Ivanpah solar power tower
—the largest solar energy project in the world. We’re excited about helping deliver clean energy to the grid and we hope this latest investment encourages other companies to think about ways they can help accelerate the deployment of more renewable energy. We remain on the lookout for more projects that make business sense and will help all of us take advantage of clean, renewable energy.
Posted by Rick Needham, Director of Green Business Operations
Investing in the world’s largest solar power tower plant
4/11/11
We’ve invested $168 million in an exciting new solar energy power plant being developed by
BrightSource Energy
in the Mojave Desert in California. Brightsource’s
Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System
(ISEGS) will generate 392 gross MW of clean, solar energy. That’s the equivalent of taking more than 90,000 cars off the road over the lifetime of the plant, projected to be more than 25 years. The investment makes business sense and will help ensure that one of the world’s largest solar energy projects is completed.
We need smart capital to transform our energy sector and build a clean energy future. This is our largest investment to date, and we’ve now invested over $250 million in the clean energy sector. We’re excited about Ivanpah because our investment will help deploy a compelling solar energy technology that provides reliable clean energy, with the potential to significantly reduce costs on future projects.
Power towers, which have
been successfully demonstrated
in the U.S. and abroad at smaller scale, are based on a relatively simple idea. The technology works by using a field of mirrors, called
heliostats
, to concentrate the sun’s rays onto a solar receiver on top of a tower. The solar receiver generates steam, which then spins a traditional turbine and generator to make electricity. Power towers are very efficient because all those mirrors focus a tremendous amount of solar energy onto a small area to produce steam at high pressure and temperature (up to 1000 degrees F). Think about burning a tuft of grass with a magnifying glass, only multiplied by thousands (or the original application:
Archimedes
’ heat ray that allegedly used mirrors to burn enemy ships!).
Brightsource Energy’s Solar Energy Development Center in Israel’s Negev desert
Several large solar projects are in the works in the sunny Southwest (and around the globe), but Ivanpah will be the first solar power tower system of this scale. The Ivanpah Power Tower will be approximately 450 feet tall and will use 173,000 heliostats, each with two mirrors. The project is being constructed by Bechtel, a major engineering firm. Construction began
in October 2010
, and is projected to finish in 2013.
The Ivanpah project will also be financed by NRG and with clean energy technology loan guarantees provided by the U.S. Department of Energy. We hope that investing in Ivanpah spurs continued development and deployment of this promising technology while encouraging other companies to make similar investments in renewable energy.
Posted by Rick Needham, Director of Green Business Operations
Google to invest in German solar power plant
4/7/11
Today, we agreed to make our first clean energy project investment in Europe - a €3.5 million (ca. $ 5 million) investment in a solar photovoltaic (PV) power plant in Germany. The transaction still requires the formal approval of the German competition authorities and is subject to other customary closing conditions.
The recently completed facility is located on 47 hectares (116 acres) in Brandenburg an der Havel, near Berlin. The power plant has a peak capacity of 18.65MWp, which puts it among the largest in Germany.
Google is always looking for new ways to encourage development and deployment of renewable energy across the world. This facility will provide clean energy to more than 5,000 households in the area surrounding Brandenburg. Until the early 90’s, the site was used as a training ground by the Russian military. We’re glad it has found a new use!
We agreed to jointly invest in this project with the German private equity company
Capital Stage
, which brings strong experience in the German photovoltaic and renewable energy market. Germany has a strong framework for renewable energy and is home to many leading-edge technology companies in the sector. More than 70% of the solar modules installed in Brandenburg are provided by German manufacturers.
After investing in
clean energy projects
in the U.S., we’re excited about making our first investment outside of the U.S. in Germany, a country that has long been a global leader in clean energy development.
Posted by Benjamin Kott, Clean Energy Advocacy Manager, Google
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