Slashdot Mirror
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.
Generating hot air, obviously.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The energy they get from the grid is from the same mix of sources as all of their neighbors. They just pay more to make a claim to be supplied by renewables.
If they are getting supplied only by renewable energy, per that same accounting game, they are taking renewable energy away from their neighbors.
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Good for them. It is refreshing to see a company helping out the rock we all live on. We may have our beefs regarding other business practices, but this is one we should all appreciate.
I can't imagine them screwing this up, although knowing Google, like many projects they'll abandon it. So perhaps this policy will be abandoned for the sake of it in the next few years like everything else?
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".
The way this works is that Google buys 120% of the power it needs from these renewable producers. It pays the grid operator to deliver 120% of its power requirement to its various data centers. It pays the grid to deliver the whole 120%. If Google only uses 100% of the power it is paying to have delivered, there is an additional 20% of power being fed into the grid. More likely, the renewable plants are delivering 200% or more of Google's instantaneous usage during the sunlight hours and that excess power get delivered to other consumers.
The grid doesn't care where power comes from after it is on the grid. It only knows how much power that is being put on the grid cost. If it gets a free 20% of Googles' power plus the transport fee from Google for that extra 20%,that is pure profit. At any given instance the grid looks at all power sources to determine where it can get the cheapest power to meet its anticipated demand. During the time the renewable plants are producing, the grid uses that power and tell the other sources to pound sand. The grid doesn't care if power is renewable or not. It only cares how much money it can make at any given instance. If it has more power sources than it needs, it can refuse power from peaker plants and they will reduce the amount of power that they produce. These plants are usually gas fired steam plants that can easily be dialed back, These peaker plants will probably become battery storage plants in the future when there are more renewable sources available than the total required peak load. In the end, the total amount of renewable energy gets consumed by somebody.
The grid operator loves it since they are essentially "buying" electricity for a negative price. When the sun goes down or the wind stops, the renewable plant stops putting energy on the grid and the grid has to start paying the carbon based peaker plants to make energy again. Maybe, at some point in the future, it will be able to draw down the battery storage before using the peaker plants. This works out great for the grid operators since their is much higher demand during the day than at night. The two big losers here are the non-renewable fuel suppliers since they aren't running the peaker plants as much and Google since they are overpaying for a specific amount of renewable power source to be generated and transported. The renewable producers are not likely to have many companies like Google to buy their power at a premium. Most companies will buy what is cheapest so the renewable operators will have to compete on price with the fossil producers.
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.
I believe in Google's case they will often actually buy capacity as part of funding new projects. So they'll buy 30MW say, of a 100MW project. This helps give certainty to projects, helps push some over into viability, and increases the pool of available renewable energy.
Google then does likely sell it, I believe they're a licenced utility in many jurisdictions. They may even see a profit on it, but it will be real ownership, as in part of the generation plant, not futures.
Economies of scale are modest for renewable energy production, and even less so if you attribute transmission line and energy storage costs to them, so this won't make renewables cost competitive. Furthermore, the supply of renewable energy technology is scarce: if Google buys a lot of it (solar cells, etc.), they are simply driving up prices for everybody else. On top of that, many renewable energy plants are subsidized by tax payers. And a lot of renewable power plants will take years to break even on their carbon budget, so this actually results in higher carbon emissions in the short term.
So what Google is effectively doing with renewable energy is the equivalent of clearcutting forests and buying taxpayer subsidized food from increasingly big agribusinesses and then throwing it away.