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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.

25 of 130 comments (clear)

  1. So - not 100% Renewable Energy then... by niftydude · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:So - not 100% Renewable Energy then... by msauve · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "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."

      Are you doing better? Not that your claim has any valid logic behind it - just because they didn't specifically claim they'll soon be "renewable" in all areas doesn't mean they aren't headed that way.

      And, define "nowhere near." I'll submit that their data centers and offices are, by far, their largest energy consumers.

      --
      "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
    2. Re:So - not 100% Renewable Energy then... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      the headline is clickbait -- it doesn't mention "operations" as the qualifier from Google's own report. without that. it's click-bait.
      flame on.

    3. Re:So - not 100% Renewable Energy then... by davide+marney · · Score: 4, Informative

      From the Report:

      "Most notably, in 2017 Google will reach 100 percent renewable energy for our global operations—including both our data c"enters and offices. That means that we will directly purchase enough wind and solar electricity annually to account for every unit of electricity we consume, globally. This shift in our energy strategy didn’t just significantly reduce our environmental impact. By pioneering new energy purchasing models that others can follow, we’ve helped drive widescale global adoption of clean energy."

      A better headline would have been, "Google will Repurpose Enough Renewable Power To Cover 100% of Its Non-Renewable Usage", but just trying running that one past the PR guy.

      --
      "We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
    4. Re: So - not 100% Renewable Energy then... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      So what about say 5000 drivers commuting 2 hours each day with 100hp engines pushing ~75000 watts using gas...or 375 Megawatts total/hour...i wonder if this makes a difference to 100% renewable. Let's face it...this is pure PR spin...if you run it out and ask how much energy was used to make the aluminium cans that hold the sparkling water used on the Google campus then there would be that along with lots of other "non-renewables".

  2. Danger Will Robinson by JimSadler · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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?

  3. Need others to follow by chromaexcursion · · Score: 2

    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...

    1. Re:Need others to follow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The fear used to be that we would run out of fossil fuels. The new fear is that fossil fuel reserves are indefatigable. There are vast untapped reserves and more being discovered. Hydraulic fracking has unlocked many reverse once though unusable and renewed those though depleted.
      The biggest risk to coal and gasoline is natural gas. There will come a time very soon when solar become ubiquitous but the question becomes one of energy storage and PV panel disposal and recycling. As long as gas is so cheap as to be a underpriced unprofitable byproduct batteries will need to become very affordable to become competitive.

    2. Re:Need others to follow by Hognoxious · · Score: 2

      Is someone peddling ?

      Yes. The salesmen, generally.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  4. electricity of San Francisco by Hadlock · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:electricity of San Francisco by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      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.

      SF consumes only half as much electricity per household as the national average. This is another reason why the no-growth policies of the "progressives" are harmful. If more people could move to SF, and other locations with pleasant climates, carbon emissions could fall significantly. SF rejects more than 95% of application for residential building permits, and few people even bother to apply.

    2. Re:electricity of San Francisco by PopeRatzo · · Score: 4, Funny

      My personal experience living there

      You're bringing anecdotes to a data fight? You of all people should know better. The discussion was not about your "personal experience". It was about the average temperature in San Francisco. And we have that data right here:

      https://www.usclimatedata.com/...

      Texans would call 76 room temperature

      You know, you've come to the right place. Until moving to the California Central Coast five weeks ago, I lived in Houston, Texas. They do not call 76 room temperature there. Air conditioning in homes and offices is almost always set between 68 and 72. And yes, that's my "personal experience". People bring sweaters to work with them in Houston. Windows in new homes do not open.

      Good job on googling "facts" though, thanks for the laugh.

      Are you suggesting that usclimatedata has somehow been doctored just to make you look foolish? Why the scare quotes around "facts"? Do you believe it's fake news?

      .

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
  5. Re: Trump will hit 100% impeached this year. by PopeRatzo · · Score: 2

    God willing. It would be a fitting end for both.

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
  6. traded not created by bigtreeman · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:traded not created by PoopJuggler · · Score: 2

      then I'll applaud.

      No you won't. People like you never applaud. You'll just find some other minutia to criticize.

  7. Environmentalists make California burn by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  8. Re:Ignoring God's gift of coal is a sin! by lucm · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

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    lucm, indeed.
  9. All energy use ends up 100% heat by raymorris · · Score: 2

    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.

  10. Re:Just in time for the antitrust consent decree by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You stupid crackpots need to stop using meaningless words as replacements for thought.

  11. Re:Ignoring God's gift of coal is a sin! by helga+the+viking · · Score: 2

    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...

  12. Re:Ignoring God's gift of coal is a sin! by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

    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
  13. Re:Ignoring God's gift of coal is a sin! by mentil · · Score: 2

    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.
  14. No, it doesn't by olau · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  15. Re:Ignoring God's gift of coal is a sin! by Zak3056 · · Score: 2

    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?
  16. Re:Ignoring God's gift of coal is a sin! by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

    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