Google Green Blog: 2015

Welcoming Internet Engine No. 15

12/22/15

Data centers are the engines of the Internet. As the next billion users come online—whether making payments from a mobile phone in Nairobi or sequencing DNA at Broad Institute in Boston—we need to increase our capacity to serve them, and keep things running blazing fast.
Today we’re announcing what will become our 15th global data center—we’re thrilled to be named new owners of the former Hemlock Semiconductor site in Montgomery County, Tennessee.
When selecting any site, we look at the unique attributes and base our designs around them to build the most efficient and high-performing data centers possible. For example, our newest data center in Alabama, U.S. will be built on the site of a coal power plant, and in Hamina, Finland we built on an old paper mill and use seawater as the sole cooling mechanism.
The Hemlock site was originally developed as a Semiconductor manufacturing plant, but unfortunately was never completed. We’ll be able to re-use much of the existing infrastructure, and will recycle and re-design what we don’t. Based on our assessments, this site will be able to house new technologies we’re currently testing in research & development, which would make this data center the most technologically advanced in the world.
We are excited to again be working with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), who will be our electricity provider at this site. Thanks to an arrangement with TVA we’ll be able to scout new renewable energy projects and work with them to bring that power onto their electrical grid; another step toward Google’s ultimate goal of being powered by 100% renewable energy. As the largest corporate energy purchaser in the world, we have signed 2 gigawatts of renewable energy supply contracts to offset the power used across our portfolio of data centers—equivalent to taking nearly 1 million cars off the road.
It’s a real pleasure to be moving into this space, and to become a part of Montgomery County. Total investments in this project will amount to more than $600 million, and we’ll start engaging with city and county officials to launch a formal community grants program around three issues: science and technology education, clean energy, and access to the Internet.

While opening a data center can take years, we can’t wait to get to the drawing board to design the next internet engine in our lineup. Good things come to those who wait!

Posted by Joe Kava, VP, Data Center Operations

Notes from COP21

12/16/15

COP21Portal displayThe Climate GroupRE100discussed their business cases

Climate CentralGlobal Forest WatchMapBiomascoral bleachingClimate Realitybroader coalition of mayorsCollect EarthMakani’sEarth Engine platformtimelapse movie#OursToLose

Posted by Kate Brandt, Lead for Sustainability

Should you go solar? Just ask Project Sunroof.

12/10/15

COP21 conference in ParisProject Sunrooffirst launchedselect metro areasProject Sunroof

2.5 minutesU.S. Solar Market Insight ReportProject SunroofPosted by Carl Elkin, Engineering Lead for Project Sunroof

Creating new pathways for buying renewable energy

11/24/15

expansionour goalGreen Source Ridermade a public pledgePosted by Gary Demasi, Data Center Energy and Location Strategy

Tracking our annual carbon footprint

10/29/15

COP21 in ParisGoogle Green websiteCO₂eCDP2data center efficiency initiativesrenewable energy purchaseshigh-quality carbon offset purchases100% local wind energyadd new capacity to the gridclimate pledge to the White House to triple our renewable energy purchases over the next decadePosted by Rachel Futrell, Technical Program Manager, Data Center Sustainability at Google

Investing in Africa’s largest wind project

10/20/15

the continent’s largest solar projecLake Turkana Wind Power ProjectincludingVestas Vestas v52 photo #3 - courtesy of Vestas.jpg

Lake Turkana will use wind turbines like these, supplied by Vestas (photo courtesy of Vestas)
future of clean energyPosted by Rick Needham, Energy & Sustainability Director

Finalists Announced for the Little Box Challenge

10/1/15

A little over a year ago, we partnered with the electrical engineering organization IEEE to launch The Little Box Challenge -- a competition to build a much smaller power inverter. Contestants from around the world have been hard at work on the challenge since then. This July, over 100 teams submitted Technical Approach and Testing Applications to have their inverters tested at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's Energy Systems Integration Facility in Golden, Colorado this fall. We are proud to announce that the 18 teams selected to have their inverters tested are:

Team Name	Country	Team Members
!verter	Germany/Switzerland	Eckart Hoene, Johann W. Kolar, Dominik Bortis, Yanick Lobsiger, Dominik Neumayr, Oliver Knecht, Florian Krismer, Stefan Hoffmann, Adam Kuczmik, Oleg Zeiter, Franc Zajc
Adiabatic Logic	UK	Geoff Harvey, Alan Walbridge, Steve Love
AHED	Germany	Alexander Huenten
AMR	Argentina	Agustin Reibel
Cambridge Active Magnetics	UK	John Wood, Ed Shelton, Tim Regan, Ellen Wood, Kyle Rogers, Dr Kevin Rathbone, Sam Harrup
Energylayer	Ukraine	Evgeny Sboychakov, Ruslan Kotelnikov
Fraunhofer IISB	Germany	Bernd Eckardt, Stefan Endres, Maximilian Hofmann, Stefan Matlok, Thomas Menrath, Martin März, Stefan Zeltner
Future Energy Electronics Center	USA	Jih-Sheng Lai, Lanhua Zhang, Xiaonan Zhao, Rachael Born, Chung-Yi Lin, Ming-Chang Chou, Shu-Shuo Chang, Kye Yak See
Helios	USA	Jack Zhu, Mari Ma
LBC1	Slovakia	Martin Pietka, Andrej Teren, Marian Vranka, Lubos Drozd, Peter Sedlacko
OKE-Services	Netherlands	Henk Oldenkamp
Red Electrical Devils	Belgium	Olivier Bomboir, Paul Bleus, Fabrice Frebel, Thierry Joannès, François Milstein, Pierre Stassain, Christophe Geuzaine, Carl Emmerechts, Philippe Laurent
Rompower	USA/Romania	Ionel Jitaru, Nicolae Daniel Bolohan, Antonio Marco Davila
Schneider Electric Team	France	Miao-xin Wang, Rajesh Ghosh, Srikanth Mudiyula, Radoslava Mitova, David Reilly, Milind Dighrasker, Sajeesh Sulaiman, Alain Dentella, Damir Klikic, Chandrashekar Devalapuraramegowda, Michael Hartmann, Vijaykumar Atadkar
The University of Tennessee	USA	Daniel Costinett, Leon Tolbert, Fred Wang, Chongwen Zhao, Bradford Trento, Ling Jiang, Rick Langley, John Jansen, Reid Kress, Anthony Brun
Tommasi - Bailly	France	Mike Tommasi, Alain Bailly
UIUC Pilawa Group	USA	Robert Pilawa, Shibin Qin, Christopher Barth, Yutian Lei, Wen-Chuen Liu, Andrew Stillwell, Intae Moon, Derek Chou, Thomas Foulkes
Venderbosch	Netherlands	Herbert Venderbosch, Gerard Bruggink

The inverters brought to NREL will undergo extensive testing to verify that they meet the specifications of the competition. The announcement of the grand prize winner is expected to take place in early 2016.

Posted by Google Green Team

Cutting the crap: 8 things you may not know that Google is doing to reduce waste

9/29/15

Humankind is using up natural resources at an astonishing rate. Each year, our economy consumes far more than what the planet can naturally provide. Recent data shows that in 2015, society’s demand for resources will be equivalent to 1.5 Earths -- clearly not a sustainable path.

Our everyday actions can help shrink this oversize footprint -- through things like traveling more efficiently or using cleaner energy -- and we’ve built many tools to help make it easier. But companies should lead by example. That belief has propelled us to become the world’s biggest corporate purchaser of renewable power, a fully carbon-neutral company, and more.

But we won’t stop there. Today we’re excited to launch a new partnership, with the UK-based Ellen MacArthur Foundation, whose mission is to accelerate the transition to a regenerative “circular economy” -- an economy that eradicates waste through smart design.

In a traditional “linear” economy, waste is rampant: finite natural resources are taken from the Earth, made into products, and ultimately disposed. A circular economy creates a more lasting, closed-loop system: it reduces the use of finite resources, and focuses on ways to continuously cycle materials back into the economy -- like renewable energy resources and highly reusable materials. As the Foundation explains in the video below, the circular approach can offer big advantages for both the planet and the financial bottom line.Fortunately, we’re not starting at square one. Our current waste reduction efforts span many areas of our business -- and demonstrate at what circular economy principles can look like in practice. Here are several ways Google has already begun to “cut the crap”:
Cutting energy waste

Over the last five years, we’ve improved our data center operations and hardware to get 3.5 times the computing power out of the same amount of electricity.

Turning waste into energy! At our main campus, we pipe in landfill gas from a local landfill to supply a portion of our electric and heating needs.

Cutting materials waste

Since 2007, we've repurposed enough outdated servers to avoid buying over 300,000 new replacement machines.

As we’ve designed and constructed new buildings in the last year, our recycling of demolition waste and onsite materials kept more than 10,000 tons of material out of landfills.

Cutting food waste

In addition to our large-scale composting program, we use a software system in our kitchens to track pre-consumer food waste (expired items, trimmings, etc.). At our Bay Area campuses alone, this system has prevented more than 170,000 pounds of food going into the waste stream over the past year.

A growing number of our kitchens serve baked goods and other foods made with Coffee Flour, a flour derived from traditionally discarded parts of a coffee plant.

Cutting water waste

At our Atlanta data center, our reuse water system enables us to use recycled wastewater from a local sewage treatment plant for our cooling needs.

At our main campus, we invest in drought-resistant landscaping and irrigate with recycled water whenever possible. We’re on track for a 30 percent reduction in campus water use by the end of this year compared to 2013.

Our partnership with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation will help us take our waste reduction and sustainability programs to the next level. Over the coming months, we’ll be working with the Foundation to explore and shape a series of initiatives to embed circular economic principles into the fabric of Google’s infrastructure, operations, and culture. Circle back with us in the coming year to hear more about where these projects take us and how they’ll support our ongoing commitment to the planet.
Posted by Jim Miller, VP of Worldwide Operations

Making the invisible visible by mapping air quality

9/28/15

How clean is the air we breathe? How much climate-warming greenhouse gases are our cities emitting? These are difficult questions to answer because most air pollution is measured at a city level, not at the neighborhood or community level which is more relevant to people's daily lives. With street-level air pollution data, a parent of an asthmatic child could reduce exposure to air pollution that causes asthma attacks when they go to the park to play. Bike commuters and outdoor enthusiasts could find the healthiest route for their trips. Or a city planner could pinpoint areas of low air quality in her city and devise specific solutions to improve it. Seeing where and when the air quality is good or bad could help identify how to reduce pollution most effectively—like changing traffic light patterns to reduce idling traffic or keeping heavy trucks out of neighborhoods that are most vulnerable.

Today at the 2015 Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting in New York, we’re announcing with Aclima that we will measure air pollution in more communities and map air quality at the street level. This follows our 2014 project with Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) to map methane leaking from natural gas local distribution systems, and our project to map multiple air pollutants in Denver with Aclima, which we announced in July.
Now, we’re equipping Google Street View cars with Aclima’s air pollution sensing platform to measure and map air quality in at least three major metropolitan areas in California, including communities in the San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Central Valley regions. With 38 million residents and nearly 30 million registered vehicles, managing California’s air quality is among the most challenging problems in the United States.

Street View car equipped with Aclima’s air pollution sensing platform
At high concentrations, particulate matter, black carbon, ozone, and other pollutants can trigger asthma attacks and make COPD worse. Worldwide, these pollutants lead to millions of premature deaths every year. These are the pollutants our cars will be measuring. Scientists working with Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and other partners are already helping us determine how the equipped vehicles should drive in order to collect data more efficiently. We’ll make the data collected during our drives available on Google Earth Engine to scientists and air quality experts, including the EDF and others, who will help analyze and model the data with the goal of linking human health impacts to air pollution and exploring other applications at a community level.

In the long run, our vision is to enable individuals, communities and policy-makers to make smart decisions to improve their health and our environment. By putting street-level air quality information overlaid on Google Earth and Google Maps, we’re making it more useful and actionable. And this, we hope, will lead to cleaner air.Posted by Karin Tuxen-Bettman, Program Manager, Google Earth Outreach

Project Sunroof: mapping the planet’s solar energy potential, one rooftop at a time

8/17/15

The cost of solar power is at a record low. A typical solar home can save hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year on their electricity bill. But, as a volunteer with the Boston-based solar program Solarize Massachusetts and a solar homeowner myself, I’ve always been surprised at how many people I encounter who think that “my roof isn’t sunny enough for solar,” or “solar is just too expensive.” Certainly many of them are missing out on a chance to save money and be green.
Enter Project Sunroof, my recent 20% project. Project Sunroof is a new online tool we’re testing to help homeowners explore whether they should go solar. Available in the San Francisco Bay Area, Fresno (in central California), and the Boston area for now, the tool uses high-resolution aerial mapping (the same used by Google Earth) to help you calculate your roof’s solar energy potential, without having to climb up any ladders.

If you’re in one of our test regions, simply enter your address and Project Sunroof will crunch the numbers. It first figures out how much sunlight hits your rooftop throughout the year, taking into account factors like roof orientation, shade from trees and nearby buildings, and local weather patterns. You can also enter your typical electric bill amount to customize the results. The tool then combines all this information to estimate the amount you could potentially save with solar panels, and it can help connect you with local solar providers. Google has always been a big believer in zero-carbon energy, and solar power has been a central part of that vision -- from accelerating the growth of rooftop solar, to helping finance the largest solar farm in Africa, to building one of America’s biggest campus solar arrays here in Mountain View. While Project Sunroof is in a pilot phase for now, during the coming months we’ll be exploring how to make the tool better and more widely available. If you find that your address isn’t covered by the tool yet, you can leave your email address and we’ll let you know when Project Sunroof is ready for your rooftop!
Posted by Carl Elkin, Engineering Lead for Project Sunroof

Green Blog

Welcoming Internet Engine No. 15

Notes from COP21

Should you go solar? Just ask Project Sunroof.

Creating new pathways for buying renewable energy

Tracking our annual carbon footprint

Investing in Africa’s largest wind project

Finalists Announced for the Little Box Challenge

Cutting the crap: 8 things you may not know that Google is doing to reduce waste

Making the invisible visible by mapping air quality

Project Sunroof: mapping the planet’s solar energy potential, one rooftop at a time

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