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Google Now Purchases More Renewable Energy Than It Consumes As a Company (theverge.com)
In a blog post today, Google announced that it now purchases more renewable energy than it consumers as a company. "Google began these efforts in 2017, with the goal of purchasing as much renewable energy as it uses across its 13 data centers and all of its office complexes," reports The Verge. From the report: To be clear, Google is not powering all of its energy consumption with renewable energy. It's matching what it consumes with equal amounts of purchased renewable energy. For every kilowatt-hour of electricity consumed, it buys a kilowatt-hour from a wind or solar farm built specifically for Google. The company says that its total purchase of energy from sources like wind and solar now exceeds the amount of electricity used by its operations. Google says it currently has contracts to purchase three gigawatts of output from renewable energy projects, and while it says "it's not yet possible to 'power' a company of our scale by 100 percent renewable energy," these purchases do have a positive impact. Google says it's helping spur development of clean energy projects, encouraging other companies to follow suit.
Except that they were very careful not to make that claim...
"What do we mean by âoematchingâ renewable energy? Over the course of 2017, across the globe, for every kilowatt hour of electricity we consumed, we purchased a kilowatt hour of renewable energy from a wind or solar farm that was built specifically for Google."
Since they built the capacity specifically for this project you can't even claim that it is taking resources away from anyone else. They are just lowering the cost of renewable energy, nothing less.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Google Energy LLC was founded in 2009.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
They're not giving money to renewable projects, they're buying from renewable projects, like any other customer. They're not taking energy from their neighbours, they're paying customers of renewable power plants (that were built just for them). They're not even claiming that all their energy use is renewable sources (because that's hard to prove and meaningless anyway) - they're simply claiming that now they're buying enough renewable energy to cover all their needs.
That level of investment helps build needed scale for the sector, and means that Google services are all carbon-neutral. Not sure what your beef is with that.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
They used to pay for carbon offsets, but they don't need to anymore. What they're paying for now isn't "energy credits" but actual kilowatt hours generated from renewable sources.
It's irrelevant whether those specific electrons power a Google server or Joe Plumber's AC; the generation mix is the important part, and net effect on the grid supply and atmospheric CO2 levels is identical either way.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
They're not giving money to renewable projects, they're buying from renewable projects, like any other customer.
Apparently not. Every other customer buys the energy they actually use. Google, here, is saying they buy MORE than they use. That's significantly different and leads to the obvious question "then where the fuck is the extra energy going".
It is sold to others, but not as renewable energy. Google buys the electricity it uses retail, but is also has a license in the US (and presumably other places) to buy and sell power wholesale. For every GWh they buy and use retail, they buy the same amount of renewable energy on the wholesale market, and sell it on again but without the renewable energy "certification".
There is more details here.
The answer is the renewable energy certificates (RECs) issued by the renewables industry to record every unit of energy that’s produced by renewable means. Producers can use RECs to verify how much clean energy they produce, and consumers can buy that verification to match against their consumption. When Google buys renewable energy, in addition to the physical power we also buy its corresponding RECs. We then sell the renewable electricity back to the wholesale market but retain the RECs. We run our facilities with ordinary power purchased from local utilities and permanently “retire” the RECs against our actual energy consumption, thus reducing our carbon footprint.