Google Will Hit 100 Percent Renewable Energy This Year (inverse.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Inverse: Google has announced that after 10 years a carbon-neutral company, it will be able to brag running on entirely renewable energy at the end of 2017. That means that all of the electricity the company consumes in both its data centers and offices are provided by wind and solar energy. Announced in Google's 2017 environmental report, Google says it has created "new energy purchasing models that others can follow" and that "we've helped drive wide-scale global adoption of clean energy." In addition to being an obvious PR boon, the company says its mission of full sustainability fits in with its larger mission. (It also makes the fact that as recently as 2015 Google alone reportedly consumed as much energy as the entire city of San Francisco in a year way more palatable.)

One step the company has recently taken in marrying its ethos of sustainability with its products is a new initiative to equip Google Street View vehicles with air quality sensors. In addition to its goal of being run by renewable energy, Google is also working on achieving zero waste to landfill. Nearly half of the company's 14 data centers have already reached this goal, according to Google executive Urs Holzle's 2017 Google Environmental report released on Tuesday.

Comments

electricity of San Francisco

[Hadlock]

Just to clarify, while SF is pretty densely populated, it's barely 800,000 people, and average outside temperature is just 7 degrees below room temperature. Most often you need to open a window to keep your apartment or office building at room temperature. Given that heating and cooling make up the lion's share of most cities' power needs this makes SF a pretty easy target to hit. Cooking is another big consumer of electricity; something like 50%+ of homes and apartments are plumbed with natural gas for cooking. Only in the winter, and only on the coldest nights have I really ever needed to kick on the heat, and usually only for an hour or two because I left the windows open during the day.

traded not created

[bigtreeman]

When Google has wind/solar on every installation, actually creating the vast amounts of electricity their servers, etc consume, then I'll applaud.
Ahhh, got it, they have created virtual electricity. It's over in fucking Norway.
And they really think paying a power company extra will get renewables built ?
Nuuu, they will suck that up in profits, and crow about how good they are, just like Google is.

My workshop is fully solar powered and returns extra power to the grid, real electricity powering real machinery, right there.

Re:Ignoring God's gift of coal is a sin!

[lucm]

Google is definitely evil!

I don't think Google is evil. I think they're simply unable as an organization to deal responsibly with their own power, like a retard who happens to hold a flamethrower.

At this point pretty much anything they achieve is due to their immense wealth, not their expertise. There is no other way to explain how an online bookstore chain managed to invent and dominate cloud computing while Google had a copy of the entire internet in their immense data centers, and how a marketing company that pays engineers below market average managed to create a more robust and secure mobile operating system while Google had access to the contributions of the best open source developers in the world.

Google needs a new CEO. Someone who would put the company back on track, get rid of the social agenda and put an end to the crooked deals. Someone like Mulally, who saved Ford and managed to put the company back on the map without feeding at the public trough (unlike GM and Chrysler). Or if it was even possible, Michael Dell, who gave the finger to Wall Street and took his company private so he could stop the short-term profit game and pivot Dell toward enterprise services instead of sticking with the dying consumer PC segment.