Google is going completely renewable in 2017
Search giant Google announced in a blog post this week that it expects to hit its goal of 100% renewable energy soon, which is a huge feat, considering the data centers it runs are massive.
Google displays how it will be 100% renewable soon / Google
The post stated that people search Google trillions of times every year and that more than 400 hours of YouTube videos are uploaded every minute. This takes a ton of energy, and even with engineers spending years perfecting the data centers and making them more efficient, Google thought it would both address climate change and make good business sense in the process.
The company has said it will buy enough wind and solar power every year to account for all the electricity it uses in its operations worldwide. It stated that the company is the largest corporate buyer of renewable power, with commitments for 2.6 gigawatts of energy, most from wind projects.
“We were one of the first corporations to create large-scale, long-term contracts to buy renewable energy directly; we signed our first agreement to purchase all the electricity from a 114-megawatt wind farm in Iowa, in 2010. Today, we are the world’s largest corporate buyer of renewable power, with commitments reaching 2.6 gigawatts (2,600 megawatts) of wind and solar energy. That’s bigger than many large utilities and more than twice as much as the 1.21 gigawatts it took to send Marty McFly back to the future,” wrote Urs Holzle, senior vice president, technical infrastructure with Google.
Other big tech companies making renewable energy commitments include Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and Apple.
"Our ultimate goal is to create a world where everyone -- not just Google -- has access to clean energy," wrote Holzle.