Google invests more into its power data centers

Dec 07, 2015

The commitments over the long term announced on Thursday cover as much as 842 megawatts of power, which will flow from six different solar and wind power projects that are scheduled to be complete within two years in Sweden, Chile and the U.S.

"We'll be building a data center campus on the same site, taking advantage of the infrastructure that was built over decades to deliver energy to the area", said Gary Demasi, Google's director of data center energy and location, in an interview with Wired. These new projects are part of the company's push to power its operations with 100% green energy, with a goal of tripling its renewable energy purchases by 2025. 842 gigawatts of clean energy to the company, thus reaching the 2 gigawatts goal that Google set for itself a while ago.

The purchased plant includes Duke Energy, located in North Carolina in the United States and makes 61 megawatts of solar power, and 71 megawatts of wind-generated electricity from Västernorrland County in Sweden and 80 megawatts generated from Chile. Each of these pacts extend 10 to 20 years. Google also has committed to purchase 200 megawatts of energy each from RES Americas of Broomfield, Colo., and EDF Renewable Energy of San Diego. The tech company is moving in one of their massive data centers that drive their online empire to a coal fired power plant in northern Alabama. The company believes that adopting renewable energy was a good beginning and will also be a motivating factor for the others in the domain. In the second case, Google buys clean energy, incorporates it into its services and then sells it back as part of its own grid. Google is not the only enterprise that is getting green; Facebook, Apple, Ikea and Microsoft have also signed green energy projects.

But the company claims it has also made separate agreements to fund $2.5 billion (£1.65m) in 22 large-scale renewable energy projects over the last five years.

Google said: "Across three countries, we're almost doubling the amount of renewable energy we've purchased to date".

Source: Newzy