Google Will Reach 100% Renewable Energy for All Their Operations in 2017
The present renewed interest in renewable resources like wind and solar have made it less expensive than standard grid power, helping people to save money and the environment going forward.
The technology giant, Google made a commitment to reach 100% renewable energy for their operation in 2012 and has made great strides toward this goal.
In fact, it has been focusing the renewable energy sources since 2007 and now their carbon footprint has been growing more slowly than their business.
According to Google’s Environmental Report 2016, it will reach 100% renewable energy for all its operations in 2017.
Google is the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy and signed 20 agreements totaling 2.6 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy— generating emissions savings equivalent to taking more than 1.2 million cars off the road.
Golden Hills wind farm in California (Image Credit: Google)
Google says its 13 data centers and offices consume about 5.7 terawatt-hours of electricity annually — nearly the same amount as San Francisco, where more than 800,000 people live and tens of thousands of others come to work and visit.
Image Credit: Google
To reduce the adverse effect of climate changes around the world, about 95 percent of Google’s renewable energy deals come from wind power farms, and balance from solar power.
On average, a Google data center uses 50% less energy than a typical data center.
Story County II wind farm in Iowa (Image Credit: Google)
Presently, Google sells its supply of renewable energy to other electricity grids whenever it isn’t possible for its own operations to use the power, reports ABC News.
Research from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory suggests that if all office workers in the United States moved their email and documents to the cloud, it would reduce IT energy use by up to 87%—enough to power the city of Los Angeles for one year, says Google’s Environmental Report. (Source: Google)
