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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.
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.
Google is definitely evil!
Yeah..what about un-recyclable non-repairable phones that you put out every six months..
No amount of virtue signaling is going to save them from that.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
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.
So this doesn't include fuel for google street view cars, manufacturing processes for the Pixel phone, Google home and other hardware, etc.
Google is nowhere near 100% renewable yet.
Congrats to google on this particular milestone, but I am utterly sick of lying click-bait headlines.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
The EPA as well as other government agencies are gagged and can not point out health safety facts to anyone including the public. If a private company starts taking measurements and releasing the results I fear that the government will do them great harm. While California burns, Houston drowns and the virgin islands and Puerto Rico barely exist now the fact that global warming is creating these horrors is hardly mentioned. And in addition to big government squashing descent , we also have the oil, coal and gas industries who could be very dangerous to anyone reporting air quality issues, Look at what they did to Flint. The fact that people were being poisoned and suffering brain damage fro water full of lead meant nothing at all to local or federal agencies. Just why are we supposed to trust our government?
Google did this by trading. They generate energy one place, use it in another.
Nothing wrong with that, but they're still dependent on other sources.
The fact that they generate as much as they used proves some pro fossil energy anal-cranial-submersion to the point of suffocation proponents need to move on.
To site the chairman of CSX, ‘Fossil Fuels Are Dead’ : https://www.huffingtonpost.com...
Coincidence, or fat traitor coward going to prison with his entire family and administration?
Hydroelectric is renewable too.
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.
moox. for a new generation.
Surely Google understands the advantages of diversity extend even to energy production.
Apparently, those lefty-commy Googlers are just hateful cabonist bigots -- disgusting!
You are a liberal... and an idiot... which is pretty much the same thing... lets be honest.
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.
Go well
Unlike you I live in California and have studied our endless fire events.
I will keep this VERY simple for you: California was designed by nature to regularly burn. It does not. Why? Because environmentalists prevent natural and human controlled sane things and instead inflicted truly nutso policies on the state.
Cutting back overgrown forests? Forbidden.
Clearing out the underbrush? Forbidden.
Letting smaller naturally occurring fires clear out underbrush and dead trees? Forbidden. Small fires stomped put immediately.
There are a few other similar policies created and enforced by moronic environmentalists whack jobs who don't want to understand the natural processes already in place by NATURE to prevent this huge fires but the above are the big ones.
End result? A truly colossal amount of dry burnable fuel built up over several years waiting for the tiniest spark to set the whole fucking state on fire. Smaller fires that the trees would normally survive burn extra hot leading to larger trees making the fires grow even bigger instead of limiting them and so we get the huge conflagrations every few years inevitably followed up by the same ignorant environmentalist nut jobs saying it's all proof of global warming and we should all drive Priuses.
This was the simple version for you. Idiot.
I'm going to finish taping the windows to keep as much smoke as possible out before I go to bed and hope my friends who live even closer to your fire survive and their homes aren't ash in the morning.
So when we say that Google consumes as much energy as a major city, we are talking about a lot of energy. Presumably most of that is going to data centers. And much of that seems to be serving our search and other needs as well as supporting the company with advertising income. Yes, some of that prodigious capability is accumulating our individual online history and no doubt it is constantly being massaged, updated and 'improved' for the benefit of their paying customers. A great deal of energy, and enough of it benefits us that we are willing to overlook the cost.
A cost that hasn't been considered is that of heat. A city generates a great deal of heat, as does Google. Even 'free' renewable energy generates heat. Heat (and the necessary cooling of equipment, which creates more heat) is becoming a major concern. The manufacture of solar and wind energy collectors also creates heat as does the manufacture of computing devices. Improvements in engineering will make servers more efficient, less wasteful of energy, but the need for massively more computing power will continue to increase the heat generated by Google and all the others.
...omphaloskepsis often...
From the report (pdf in the article):
"Third, we buy carbon offsets for any remaining emissions we haven’t yet eliminated."
Just another carbon credit scam. Nothing to see here.
We about to go WW3 and you pussys woried about googoo using x% renewable
In fact, 100% of all energy used by anyone ends up as heat.
All that solar and wind energy - it ends up being converted to heat. All of it.
Okay, so if you use the energy to lift something up, it doesn't turn to heat until the thing comes back down.
Somehow a little carbon dioxide (that will be consumed by plants) bothers me less than ugly windmills on the hills of Andalucia.
The biggest factor will be shifting computing power to the browsers via client-side scripting!
Let the stupid users cope with the CO2
No matter what I personally think of Google, this is something positive for the company to claim. However, in and around me there are a lot of people rejecting solar and wind energy programs. Kind of ironic though that technology is also requiring a lot of energy to run all those servers and PC's at Google.
That means that all of the electricity the company consumes in both its data centers and offices are provided by wind and solar energy.
It means that Google has purchased certificates and similar corresponding to their energy consumption. The data centers and offices are still running on power from coal and whatnot just like all their neighbours.
Don't get me wrong, it's great that Google as a great resource hog is investing in renewables. But the above "explanation" is spreading misinformation. For the above to be true, Google would have to run everything in isolated as isolated islands. That would be a lot more expensive.
How much did it cost to become (ahem) 100% renewable?
No. They're still getting power from other sources as well.
They're simply paying an hefty offset to subsidize renewable sources.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
If you look at the amount of "renewable" energy sold versus the amount of "renewable" energy generated, it is clear that different definitions are used to arrive at each number.
In the United States, most tariff rates for renewable energy include a clause that says the utility can provide you with conventional energy if they are unable to purchase sufficient "renewable" energy to supply to you. You still pay the higher rate, of course, but they can purchase cheaper energy to supply you.
There is also no limit to the amount of "renewable" energy a utility can sell. They are not required to limit sales to what they are able to purchase, or even to what is generated in the entire country. They can sell as much as they want, under the clause that they can provide other forms of energy if sufficient renewable is not available.
They do not have to inform you, either. This is just another example of how renewable energy is a scam, at least in the US. You could be paying 25c/kWh for what you think is renewable, when you're actually getting 8c coal-fired energy from Pennsylvania or Ohio. Your utility and its investors just smile all the way to the bank.
You are definitely right about that. This generation is population by a bunch of morons who can't do simple cost/benefit analysis, or a thorough and honest wall to wall environmental impact evaluation.
Aren't accounting tricks wonderful?
They also pay almost NO TAXES on what they show as ALMOST NO INCOME in the USA.
This sounds a lot like corporate speak. I am sure they really have stretched the definition of carbon neutral to nearly its breaking point. How can you tell a marketing professional is lying? Their lips are moving.
Endothermic reactions always result in products less stable than the reactants. That's why they are endothermic. That heat is being stored in bonds where it will later (potentially much later) be released in an exothermic reaction.
I'm not sure about this https://williamreview.com/soci...
http://williamreview.com/
If Google can run its Data Centers on renewable energy, they have to be exponentially smaller than Amazon, Oracle or Microsoft. I can't imagine they are smaller.
"Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach," wrote Google's Ross Koningstein and David Fork in a piece published yesterday in IEEE's Spectrum.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change
Haha - they stand out to me as a company that abandons stuff they start more than about anyone.
And it's a lie. They rent office space all over the world in normal buildings. That won't change.
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.
Why didn't Google wait until they actually were 100% powered by green energy? Now, after pre-announcing a future accomplishment, if/when it does happen it will not be as noteworthy. It's kind like when your friends tell you they are going to have a baby, and you congratulate them - only to find out all they meant was that she was going off contraceptives and they plan on having more purposeful sex in the immediate future...
Ken
It's not an offset; they're actually buying the electricity from renewables. From the release:
"... we will directly purchase enough wind and solar electricity annually to account for every unit of electricity we consume, globally. "
Speaking of retards, have you looked in a mirror lately?
As a matter of fact I have. And do you know what I saw? The face of your mom while I was sodomizing her in your bathroom (which is the only option left since giving birth to a morbidly obese moron like you kinda ruined her cunt).
lucm, indeed.