
Google is officially 100% sun and wind powered – 3.0 gigawatts worth - rippsu
https://electrek.co/2017/11/30/google-is-officially-100-sun-and-wind-powered-3-0-gigawatts-worth/
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allenz
Great work.

Specifically, Google purchases 3 GW of renewable energy and sells it to the
grid at a loss.[1] This isn't the same as being directly powered by renewables
because they don't have to worry about time shifting supply and demand, which
is often done using natural gas.

[1] cloud.google.com/environment/

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ZeroGravitas
A more important caveat is that it's only talking about their electricity
usage, presumably people still drive to work in ICE cars, fly airplanes, ship
devices around the world, the accounting for even just electricity usage can
extend out to suppliers and suppliers of suppliers etc.

But it's still a very good thing and others should follow suit.

Also, can you show your working for them "selling at a loss". They generate
renewable energy then sell the energy and keep the certificates that say it's
renewable, those are both worth something. Are you saying they could have
bought the certificates on the open market for less, because I don't think
that's the case.

~~~
allenz
Google's report from 2013, cited from their blog, says that they resell
electricity at a "slight net loss".[1]

I didn't compare to buying RECs. The point is that Google is 100% renewable
voluntarily. While RECs may be worth some tax credits, it's obviously a net
cost or else Facebook would also be 100% renewable.

That said, I'm fairly confident that Google's approach is more costly than
just buying RECs because demand for RECs is not very high. Google doesn't buy
RECs directly because they want stronger guarantees of additionality:

"Buying a few years’ worth of RECs from a renewable project does not provide
the stable and sizable cash stream that a renewable project developer needs to
get financing to build new green power projects. In a PPA [power purchasing
agreement], Google is agreeing to buy all the power from a project for many
years. Google has, in effect, totally accepted the power price risk that the
project owner would otherwise face—instead of taking the risk of selling into
the power market on a short-term basis, Google is providing the seller with a
guaranteed revenue stream for 20 years. This is something the developer can
literally take to the bank. If we were to buy only the RECs, this would
represent a fraction of the value of a typical power project,5 and would still
leave the renewable developer to face the market risks of future energy
prices, making it much harder for them to obtain financing for projects.

[1]
[http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...](http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/cfz.cc/en/us/green/pdfs/renewable-
energy.pdf)

------
westurner
+1000.

[https://environment.google](https://environment.google)

TIL this is called "Corporate Renewable Energy Procurement".
[https://www.google.com/search?q=Corporate+Renewable+Energy+P...](https://www.google.com/search?q=Corporate+Renewable+Energy+Procurement)

PPA: Power Purchase Agreement
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_purchase_agreement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_purchase_agreement)

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murph-almighty
This is amazing, especially considering their cloud services. Powering an
entire datacenter on renewable can NOT be easy.

Does Amazon have a similar initiative? Given their market share in the cloud
and their widespread AZ's I imagine it'd be tricky.

edit: jk, apparently their energy needs are half that of Google and they're
making headway. ([https://electrek.co/2017/10/19/amazon-wind-
farm/](https://electrek.co/2017/10/19/amazon-wind-farm/))

~~~
dastbe
I think your math on that last bit is off. The article states they have 1.2GW,
which is somewhere between 40% and 50% of Amazon's power usage (started 2016
at 40%, expect to exit at 50%). That would peg 100% at somewhere between 2.4
and 3.

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flukus
> Google is officially off-setting 100% of its energy usage with either wind
> or solar power.

A tad misleading, they are still reliant on fossil fuels but are offsetting it
elsewhere. That said I think the congratulations are well deserved.

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blibble
that's almost just under one bitcoin...

[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bitcoin-mining-energy-
consumpti...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bitcoin-mining-energy-consumption/)
says miners use 29.05TWh annually, so [29.05TWh / (365 * 24)h] = 3.3GW

~~~
timthelion
I'm confused, you mean that the bitcoin network takes 3.3GW or it takes 3.3GWh
to mine one bitcoin? It seems that google takes the same electricity as the
entire bitcoin network.

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dvddgld
Now that's more than impressive, well done Google

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thewhitetulip
This is absolutely amazing.

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cdancette
Why do they sell at loss? Is the energy they buy from the grid cheaper than
the energy they buy from renewable sources?

And do they just make an exchange with the grid for the same amount of energy?

~~~
drwl
My guess is that sometimes it costs money to provide energy. I would imagine
it has to do with supply and demand at that time.

[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601221/texas-and-
californ...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601221/texas-and-california-
have-too-much-renewable-energy/)

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stuaxo
I guess this is just their servers. How about from server to screen, this has
to be a future aim ?

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nkkollaw
Great Scott!

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jbb67
so?

~~~
jacksmith21006
You do not find this amazing?

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m0llusk
This is great progress, but there are still some significant low hanging fruit
to consider. For example, the power it takes to display the all white
background of the search and other top Google pages is significant. Changing
that to black or partly black or some darker color could save amounts of
energy that are hard to calculate and represent draw from all over the
network.

~~~
bhhaskin
The largest power drain in an LCD/LED screen is the backlight and that has to
be running regardless of which color is being displayed. This would only
benefit OLED screen (which doesn't have a normal backlight) which are pretty
much only used on high-end phones and TVs. Unlikely to make a significant
impact in energy use, and furthermore any amount of energy savings would
likely be lost in the extra amount of black ink needed to print out pages.

