Green Blog
A better web. Better for the environment.
An update on Google.org and philanthropy @ Google
3/8/10
(Cross-posted from the
Google.org Blog
)
What do tracking flu, helping consumers monitor their home electricity use, slowing deforestation and perhaps most importantly in 2010, helping the people of Haiti have in common?
While they are all part of the wide-ranging work of
Google.org
over the last year, they also show what our technical teams can accomplish in critical areas that don't always get the attention they need and deserve.
A year ago we outlined our goals for
the next chapter for Google.org
. We talked about our vision to use strengths of Google in information and technology to build products and advocate for critical policies that address global challenges. Ideas for projects continue to pour in from Googlers and partners around the globe, and we're incubating several new projects in the areas of economic development, clean energy and access to technology.
This past year, we:
Ramped up
Google PowerMeter
to help consumers reduce their electricity use and save money, secured utility and device partners, and launched the API on code.google.com to help expand partner access globally.
Introduced
Earth Engine
, a new computational platform we have begun building for global-scale analysis of satellite imagery to monitor changes in key environmental indicators like forest coverage, at
COP15
in December.
Quickly expanded
Google Flu Trends
to
20 countries and 38 languages
as the H1N1 flu virus spread around the world. We also added city-level flu estimates to
121 U.S. cities
and developed the
Flu Shot Finder
to help people find vaccine locations.
Responded to earthquakes in
Haiti
and
Chile
, with maps, updated earth imagery, and networking projects, and built
Person Finder
to help people find information about their loved ones after a disaster.
Advocated for policies
to spur innovation of renewable energy technologies that are cheaper than coal (
RE<C
), and our engineers worked on ways to reduce the cost of solar thermal and other RE<C technologies.
We will continue to greenlight large scale engineering projects that build on Google's strengths in technology, our computing infrastructure and global teams.
Overall, our
philanthropic mission at Google
includes our Google.org projects and a range of other initiatives — from grants, scholarships and other charitable giving programs to in-kind product support for non-profits. Our founders have
set a goal
of devoting approximately 1% of Google's equity and yearly profits to philanthropy. In 2009, we devoted around $100 million plus in-kind giving to a broad range of philanthropic efforts. Here are some highlights:
Academic scholarships and awards
: We provide
scholarships
to encourage students of various backgrounds, ethnicities and gender to excel in their studies in hopes that these and other programs will help dismantle barriers that keep women and minorities from entering computing and technology fields.
Academic grants
: We support the next generation of engineers and maintain strong ties with academic institutions worldwide that are pursuing research in core areas relevant to our mission. We
fund projects
across a variety of subjects, host visiting faculty members at Google, and have launched the
Google Fellowship Program
to fund graduate students doing innovative research in several fields.
Holiday charitable gift
: We made $22 million in donations in 2009 to a couple of dozen deserving charities around the world to help organizations that have been stretched thin by more requests for help in a year of fewer donations.
Employee gift matching
: Google matches up to $6,000 for each employee's annual charitable contributions and contributes $50 for every five hours an employee volunteers through our "Dollars for Doers" program to encourage employee participation in charitable causes.
Charitable Giving Council
: We support grants for Googler-led partnerships on causes such as K-12 educational initiatives in science, math and technology.
Community affairs
: We invest in communities where Google has a presence around the world, creating opportunities for Googlers to invest time and expertise, engage in local grant making and build partnerships with local stakeholders.
In addition, our
Google for Non-Profits
site provides information and links to free tools to help charitable groups promote their cause, raise money, collaborate with others and operate more efficiently.
Google Grants
, for example, offers in-kind AdWords advertising to non-profit organizations. Since the program began, we've donated over $625 million worth of AdWords advertising to all kinds of charitable organizations.
To keep up with our activities, check out the
Google.org blog
.
Posted by Megan Smith, VP and General Manager, Google.org
Google PowerMeter API introduced for device manufacturers
3/3/10
(Cross-posted from
Google Code Blog
)
Today we're excited to introduce the
Google PowerMeter API
on code.google.com, for developers interested in integrating with
Google PowerMeter
. This API will allow device manufacturers to build home energy monitoring devices that work with Google PowerMeter. We're launching this API in order to help build the ecosystem of innovative developers working towards making energy information more widely available to consumers.
In today's launch of the API on code.google.com we are highlighting the core design principles towards integrating with Google PowerMeter. In particular we outline the underlying data model and the accompanying protocols to ensure that Google PowerMeter provides consumers access to their energy consumption with utmost care in maintaining the user's
privacy and control on access to the information
. We also highlight, with code samples and client implementations, how to easily start building your PowerMeter-compatible device.
Tune into
our blog
and subscribe to our
notification list
for announcements on upcoming developments. We are thrilled to bring together a rich framework to help more developers integrate with Google PowerMeter with our open, standards-based API. We are looking to expose expanded features of this framework to the developer community in the coming months.
Finally, we want your feedback! Ask questions, suggest topics, and share your stories. You can do this at the
Developer Lounge
section of the Google PowerMeter forum.
We hope you join us for the ride ahead.
Posted by Srikanth Rajagopalan, Product Manager
How much power do you use in the middle of the night?
2/2/10
"Always On" power is the lowest level of sustained power used during a day-long period. On our energy-monitoring software tool,
Google PowerMeter
, this shows up as a dark green bar on your power usage graph. We've found that American users, on average, have 589 watts of electrical power being consumed
all day long
. What items are using all this electricity?
- "Vampire loads" - appliances that don't really turn off, even when you're not actively using them
- Old appliances, especially refrigerators
- Lights that are never turned off
- Outdoor lights
- Cable box or DVR
- Computers that never turn off
- Electric water heaters
Here's the good news: It's typically very easy to reduce your Always On power. Below is a graph of a household that did just that. This household started reducing electricity use by turning off their outdoor lighting (green period) instead of leaving the lights on all day (red period). That change reduced the average Always On from 420 watts to 300 watts. That 120 watt Always On reduction can yield hundreds of dollars in estimated savings over a single year!
On January 27, 2010, almost 40% of Google PowerMeter users had Always On levels at over 500 watts. If these users reduced that amount by just 100 watts each, that's a significant cumulative savings. (Look for more of these aggregate analyses of our data in the future as we continue to learn more about how people use electricity.)
Posted by Omar Khan, Software Engineer
FCC broadband plan to call for access to real-time energy info
1/21/10
(Cross-posted from
Public Policy Blog
)
Over the past six months we have been providing you with periodic updates and
comments
on the
FCC's National Broadband Plan
, which is scheduled for release in mid-March. Earlier today FCC energy and environment director Nick Sinai gave a sneak preview of one of the Plan's key components: how broadband will facilitate smarter energy usage.
He
told an audience
at the
Clean-tech Investor Summit
that the FCC will call on States and the Congress to give consumers and consumer-authorized third parties access to real-time energy information. This kind of information could have a huge financial and environmental impact.
Studies show
that access to real-time usage data results in energy savings of up to 15%. He talked about how, combined with other measures, this information could create a platform that could lead to new products and services to help consumers manage energy. Picture it: a smart phone apps store for home energy management.
Sinai singled out for praise technologies like "smart" electricity meters and recent efforts in California to include consumer data access policies as part of a statewide smart meter roll out. (Learn more by reading
Google's comments
.) While encouraged by state-led initiatives like this, Sinai said if state efforts don't work, the FCC could recommend that Congress consider national energy data accessibility legislation.
Posted by Michael Terrell, Energy Policy Counsel
Carbon offsets at Google
12/17/09
(Cross-posted from the
Official Google Blog
to bring you information on other green efforts at Google)
As leaders from around the world meet in Copenhagen to address global climate change this month, we thought it was a good time to reflect on our own carbon footprint. In 2007, we committed to become a
carbon neutral company
. We know that it isn't possible to write a check and eliminate the environmental impact of our operations. So what does “carbon neutrality” mean to us?
First, we aggressively pursue reductions in our energy consumption through energy efficiency, innovative infrastructure design and operations and
on-site renewable energy
. Our Google designed data centers use
half the energy
of typical facilities. We're also working to accelerate the development of economic, clean renewable energy at scale through research and development, investment and policy outreach. At this time, however, such efforts don't cover our entire carbon footprint. Therefore, since 2007 we've gone a step further and made a voluntary commitment to buy carbon offsets to cover the portion of our footprint that we cannot yet eliminate — which is what we mean by "carbon neutrality."
So what exactly is a carbon offset? The idea behind an offset is that we pay someone to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in a specific, measurable way, thus offseting an equal climate impact on our side. To determine our impact, we calculate our annual carbon footprint, which is then verified by an independent third party. We include direct energy consumption (like natural gas) and electricity use, employee commuting, company vehicle use, business travel and estimates of carbon emissions from building construction and from the manufacturing of servers used in our datacenters. We then buy an equivalent number of carbon offsets.
While carbon offsets seem simple in principle, in practice they are surprisingly complicated. In particular, it's often difficult to say whether or not the offset project results in emissions reductions that would have happened anyway. We find ourselves asking whether the project in fact goes beyond "business as usual." In the world of offsets, this concept is referred to as "
additionality
." Carbon offsets have a mixed reputation because some projects are not additional. Here at Google, we have set a very high bar to ensure that our investment makes an actual difference in reducing greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing offsets that are real, verifiable, permanent and additional.
To date, we have selected high quality carbon offsets from around the world that reduce greenhouse gas emissions — ranging from landfill gas projects in Caldwell County, NC, and Steuben County, NY, to animal-waste management systems in Mexico and Brazil. Our funding helps make it possible for equipment to be installed that captures and destroys the methane gas produced as the waste decomposes.
Methane
, the primary component in natural gas, is a significant contributor to global warming. We chose to focus on landfill and agricultural methane reduction projects because methane's impact on warming is very well understood, it's easy to measure how much methane is captured and the capture wouldn't happen without our financing (for the projects we're investing in, they couldn't make enough money selling the gas).
We need fundamental changes to global energy and transportation infrastructure to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions over the long term. In the meantime, the projects to which we contribute offer measurable emissions reductions and allow us to take responsibility for our carbon footprint. To that end, we're always looking for good emissions-reduction projects to support. If you have a landfill gas or agricultural methane carbon offset project you think we should consider, please visit
this page
for more information about how to participate in our latest carbon-offset procurement round.
Posted by Alice Ryan, Green Energy Project Manager
Earth Engine, powered by Google
12/16/09
I'm here in Copenhagen this week, at the COP15 International Climate Change Conference. Whether you're attending in-person, or reading news headlines from home, you can't miss the fact that addressing climate change requires the world to solve a mind-boggling mix of science, policy and political issues. These are formidable challenges, but new technologies can help provide solutions for these complex problems. For example, one of the most promising areas of compromise has been an accord to compensate countries for preserving forests and other natural landscapes that play a crucial role in reducing emissions. Implementation of the agreement, known as
Reducing Emissions From Deforestation and Forest Degradation
, or REDD, will require the ability to accurately track deforestation at a regional and global level.
Despite the widespread availability of global satellite imagery through products like Google Earth and Google Maps, it hasn't been easy for tropical nations to understand the state of their ecosystem, and to quantitatively monitor changes in forest coverage or other key indicators. That's why I'm proud to announce a new computational platform for global-scale analysis of satellite imagery: Earth Engine, powered by Google.
At an event today hosted by
Avoided Deforestation Partners
, global leaders from the President of Guyana to the Prime Minister of Norway expressed their support for REDD. Earlier today, the U.S, Australia, France, Japan, Norway and Britain pledged $3.5 billion over the next three years to protect rainforests. At the event, I demonstrated a prototype forest monitoring application built on top of Earth Engine that we developed together with the
Carnegie Institution for Science
,
IMAZON
and the
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
. Traditional forest monitoring is complex and expensive, requiring access to large amounts of satellite data, lots of hard drives to hold the data, lots of computers to process the data, and lots of time while you wait for various computations to finish. Our prototype demonstrates how Earth Engine makes all of this easier, by moving everything into the cloud. Google supplies data, storage, and computing muscle. As a result, you can visualize forest change in fractions of a second over the web, instead of the minutes or hours that traditional offline systems require for such analysis. The prototype applications running on Earth Engine aren't yet available to the public, but you can see screen shots in our earlier
blog post
.
We want to ensure this technology is widely available when it's ready, so today I formally announced Google.org's commitment to provide our Earth Engine free to tropical countries to support their forest monitoring programs. I believe that this is just the first of many Earth Engine applications that will help enable scientists, policymakers, and the general public to better monitor and understand the Earth's ecosystems.
Posted by Brian McClendon, VP Engineering
A simple way to curb climate change
12/15/09
(Cross-posted from Google's
Public Policy Blog
)
People often get up in settings like the
international climate change conference
in Copenhagen and make complicated pronouncements that leave heads spinning. Today was different. Google, GE, the Climate Group, and NRDC, supported by other leading businesses and NGOs, had
a simple message
: governments across the world should ensure people have real-time access to their home energy information.
Most of us know little about how we use energy in our homes, other than what our monthy power bill tells us. Yet
studies
show that when people can see in real-time how much energy they are using, they save up to 15% on their electricity use with simple behavioral changes, and even more with investments in energy efficiency. The savings are huge when added up: if all US households reduced 15% of their energy use by 2020 it would be equivalent to taking 35 million cars off the road and would save consumers $46 billion on their energy bills.
As 40,000 people gather in Copenhagen to fight global warming, we think that's a solution that governments should be paying attention to. This group, which will take other actions after the meeting has ended, has begun a push to give ordinary citizens the tools to save money and save the planet. A lot of the decisions on the table in Copenhagen are hard, we believe this one is simple.
Copenhagen statement signers: Google, GE, The Climate Group, NRDC, Alliance to Save Energy, Center for American Progress, Demand Response and Smart Grid Coalition, Digital Energy Solutions Campaign, Dow, Energy Future Coalition, Intel, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, US Green Building Council, Whirlpool
Posted by Michael Terrell, Energy Policy Counsel, Google.org
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