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