Green Blog
A better web. Better for the environment.
More Nordic wind power for our European data centers
6/29/16
Posted by Marc Oman, EU Energy Lead, Google Global Infrastructure
At the end of last year, we
announced
that we were purchasing a whopping 842 megawatts (MW) of additional renewable energy to power our operations and take us one step closer to running 100 percent of our operations on clean energy. Today, we walked further down that path by agreeing to purchase an additional 236 MW of energy from two new wind farms in Norway and Sweden.
These new Nordic power purchase agreements complement our three other Swedish wind deals and enable us to power even more of our European operations with renewable energy. In total, we now have seven purchase agreements in Europe, totalling more than 500 MW and 18 such deals globally, which means we’ve now purchased nearly 2.5 gigawatts (GW) worldwide – the equivalent of taking over 1 million cars off the road.
As with our other power purchase agreements, we’re buying the entire production of these new wind farms, situated in two great areas for onshore wind in Europe. In Norway, power will be generated by a 50-turbine project near Stavanger, which is set to be completed in late 2017. In Sweden, we’re buying power from a 22-turbine project, near Mariestad and Töreboda, which will be completed by early 2018. In both cases, we’ve signed long-term contracts that give us price certainty and help wind farm developers secure construction financing, in these cases from companies like
Blackrock
and
Ardian
.
One of our key goals is to enable the addition of new renewable energy generation capacity to the grid, rather than drawing power from existing facilities. And thanks to Europe’s increasingly integrated energy market, we’re able to buy wind energy in Norway and Sweden, and consume it elsewhere in Europe.
We’ve known for a long time that
reducing energy usage
and using renewables makes good business sense - we signed our first major power purchase agreement for
114 MW of Iowa wind
in 2010. Others are discovering the benefits of renewables too - in the US alone, companies bought almost
3.5 GW of renewable energy last year
. We’re pleased to have played a part in stimulating the market for corporate renewable energy purchasing and doing our share in the effort to mitigate climate change.
Photo of wind turbine in Sweden by BMJ via Shutterstock
Data Centers Get Fit on Efficiency
6/27/16
Post content
Posted by Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure
Google’s efforts to build the world’s most efficient data centers are beginning to give back -- in energy. A
study
just released by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) shows that in the last five years, data center efficiency has kept energy usage almost flat despite a huge growth in demand for computing power.
In fact, compared to five years ago, we can now deliver over 3.5 times as much computing power for the same amount of electrical power. That means that even though we’re sending more email, watching more YouTube videos, and saving more digital photos, we’re using the same amount of energy.
Let’s dig into some numbers from the
report
:
In 2014, U.S. data centers used 70 billion kWh of energy -- equal to powering more than six million homes for a year.
This is a big shift in energy consumption:
From 2000 to 2005, usage grew 90 percent;
From 2005 to 2010, usage grew 24 percent;
From 2010 to 2014, usage grew 4 percent.
Energy use is expected to increase at the same rate of four percent from 2014 to 2020.
Inside a Google data center
Stabilizing data center energy usage is great, but at Google, we believe we will
go further than simply stopping the growth
. As more IT users transition to public clouds and mobile use increases, total energy usage will likely go down even more. On the server side, ultra-efficient cloud capacity replaces older, less efficient corporate data centers, and on the client side, battery life pressures ensure that mobile devices use much less energy than desktops.
The cloud supports many products at a time, so it can more efficiently distribute resources among many users. That means we can do more with less energy—and businesses can too. In 2013, the Berkeley Lab
published research
we helped support, indicating that moving all office workers in the United States to the cloud could reduce the energy used by information technology by up to 87 percent. That’s equal to powering the city of Los Angeles for one year.
2013 U.S. Case Study: Energy Efficiency Potential of Cloud-based Software (Berkeley Lab)
Efficiency in data center operations like Google’s comes from shifting to super efficient computing, along with improvements in storage, network and infrastructure, employing more advanced cooling strategies, better power management software, and consolidating servers.
We are focused on creating platforms where everyone can benefit. Google builds hyperscale data centers that are designed to maximize infrastructure efficiency. We also began publishing our
efficiency data
in 2008 and have been promoting techniques for more efficient energy use to leaders in the IT industry, starting with the first
data center efficiency summit
in 2009 and our continued advances with
machine learning
.
These results show the rapid impact efficiency can have on the industry and the persistent opportunity we have to reduce energy use while creating a more powerful web.
Innovating for a Cleaner Energy Future
6/2/16
Energy ministers from around the globe visited the Bay Area this week for their first meeting following the signing of historic
climate change agreements
in France last year. The focus of the annual gathering for the seventh
Clean Energy Ministerial
, known as CEM7, was to discuss how to achieve the goals set in the Paris climate change deal as well as see some of the innovations coming out of Silicon Valley to tackle the issue head on.
A number of ministers embarked on a fact finding mission that included Google where they came to learn at first hand about our approach and commitment to clean energy and the climate.
Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure
Urs Hölzle
told the group that renewable energy is critical for businesses like ours -- from powering our data centers to our products and services.
“ Having pioneered some of the first corporate renewable power purchasing back in 2010-2011, we’re excited to see that this is becoming business-as-usual for companies everywhere. And at Google we continue to be committed to 100% renewable energy because this makes good business sense and is the right thing to do for the planet and for our users.”
US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz who led the visit to Google was joined by ministers and officials from countries like the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Chile, India, Indonesia, and South Africa.
The group got the opportunity to see at first hand a number of projects aimed at everything from helping people make smart choices about
solar power
to how we power our
data centers
with renewable energy, and from advancing new approaches to
wind power
to helping consumers
save energy in the home
and the benefits of
self driving cars
.
Self-driving cars could reduce the energy intensity per vehicle through a combination of more efficient vehicle designs, driving behaviors, routing, power usage, and capabilities for vehicles to drive closer to each other, according to
U.S. Department of Energy, 2014
.
In an effort to build on this week’s momentum the CEM launched a campaign that will promote solutions that enable more companies to purchase renewable power. As part of this effort, Google has agreed later this year to host national governments, renewable energy buyers and suppliers, NGOs, and other interested groups as they look for ways to further unlock corporate renewable energy demand in CEM countries.
Mars Hanna, Global Energy Policy and Strategy
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