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 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...
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.
God willing. It would be a fitting end for both.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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.
lucm, indeed.
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.
You stupid crackpots need to stop using meaningless words as replacements for thought.
The word you're missing is share buybacks. As soon as that happens its a lighthouse announcing the CEO's dont give a toss about innovation or R&D: http://evonomics.com/ralph-nad...
Waaaaaah! Stop caring! Your investing large amounts of money in clean energy makes my coal rolling look bad!
Actually there is probably a good economic reason for doing it. Renewables are now the cheapest form of electricity.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Right, I bet the shareholders are just lining up to demand that Google gets a new CEO after a disastrous 29% increase in profits last year. Clearly Google is dying and in need of a rockstar CEO to save them. I hear Melissa Mayer is available.
https://www.reuters.com/articl...
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Putting someone who's not an engineer in charge of Google would be a great way to turn them into yet another IT consulting firm. An engineer with no background in IT wouldn't necessarily grok fundamental principles a la Mythical Man Month, or have the wisdom to avoid sinking money into the latest IT buzzword hype tech.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
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.
Renewables are now the cheapest form of electricity.
Let me lookee in Ontario. Hmm...that would be a nope. And it's only gotten worse in the last year since that article was published, and they've become more expensive.
Om, nomnomnom...
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!!!
I don't disagree with you, but by the same metric, Steve Ballmer was a fantastic CEO as well. The GP's post was pretty interesting and didn't deserve to be simply dismissed.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
So it wouldn't change much, then?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
Perhaps the "retard with a flamethrower" comment lowered my opinion of the GP's post.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
In the UK renewables are now going subsidy free, the only source of electricity available that can do so. There is simply nothing cheaper, nothing else with zero subsidy.
Maybe you should be asking why it's gone so badly wrong in Ontario when other places have benefited hugely. Also less important but still worth pointing out, I said "now" and your article is about things that started happening in 2003.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Maybe you should be asking why it's gone so badly wrong in Ontario when other places have benefited hugely. Also less important but still worth pointing out, I said "now" and your article is about things that started happening in 2003.
Keep in mind that the only reason that it can go subsidy free in the UK is because you're an island with next to zero natural resources, or resources you want to exploit. On the otherhand, canada(like the US) has an over abundance of natural resources that are easy to exploit on top of things like rivers and natural valley's which make dam construction easy.
Maybe you should ask why it's such a failure all over north america except in specific places. Oh, the green energy bit didn't happen until 2009. And there's the reason why it's a failure all over north america, because other forms of energy are vastly cheaper then windmills and solar panels.
Om, nomnomnom...
Next to zero natural resources? We had a massive coal industry that only closed because coal demand went down and cheap imports went up. There is still estimated to be ~100 years worth left in the ground. We also have gas from the North Sea and potentially via fracking. We were also one of the first to start using nuclear power, after the US screwed us over on the bomb and we had to build our own.
We also have quite a bit of hydro power. Up north the wind resources are some of the best in the world, although it's actually solar farms with battery storage that are going subsidy free now. And we are in the north of Europe, supposedly terrible for solar, and yet...
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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
I believe it was the Soviet Union that killed the vast majority of the Nazi's in WW2, not the USA.
Also remember the UK did not benefit from the Marshall Plan as the rest of Western Europe did.
However the States did clean up the Japanese Empire with some assistance from the Brits and others.
New Zealanders are well balanced with a chip on each shoulder. One represents Australia, the other the rest of the world
Putting someone who's not an engineer in charge of Google would be a great way to turn them into yet another IT consulting firm. An engineer with no background in IT wouldn't necessarily grok fundamental principles a la Mythical Man Month, or have the wisdom to avoid sinking money into the latest IT buzzword hype tech.
Stop kidding yourself with the techie CEO fantasy. There's been very skilled ones (like Bill Gates, who is the real deal and who did brutal code reviews while being a CEO) but there's also been ones with very shallow expertise, like Zuckerberg or Jobs, or no skills at all, like Jeff Bezos. Every success story is different.
10 seconds of googling to find tech companies that didn't have a techie founder/CEO, besides Amazon:
Pinterest
Snapchat
Groupon
Alibaba
lucm, indeed.
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.
~100 years worth? That's massive? The town my sister lives in out in Alberta has enough coal around it for 600-800 years of current usage(US, Canada and China). That's one area of northern alberta not even close to the area of the oils sands(that's 500km away), or one of the dozen other mines in just Alberta alone. There's multiple mines in eastern canada that have more. That's not even counting one of the largest sour gas(bitter natural gas) concentrations in the world. Yeah, you've got next to zero natural resources, Canada has so much in terms of raw resources it's stupid. Hell we've got so many trees we're trying to get rid of from pine beetle destruction that multiple EU countries are bidding on contracts for exclusive clear-cutting and replanting to be used in wood-pellet power plants. Not to forget heavy water, Canada which holds upwards of 70% of the worlds supply.
That's not even touching on stuff like nickle, iron, lime, radioactives, gold, platinum, diamonds, rare earths, and so on. If you can think of it, we've probably either got it in the ground or can make it. One of the few things we lack is aluminum(bauxite rather) You really have no idea how 'big' this country is or how much raw resources are available to pull out of the ground here.
Om, nomnomnom...
~100 years worth? That's massive?
Mashiki, I know we rarely see eye-to-eye, but come on... Are you really saying that renewables are cheaper because there's "only" 100 years of coal left in the UK, not to mention the cheap imports that are what killed our local coal industry?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
There's a difference between a non-techie who founds a company and one who comes along later.