Blog 7: Google Embraces Renewables for Energy Efficiency

Google has recently been noted to have a huge plan of converting to energy efficient means. Due to their large data centers sucking up so much power, they have had to change their energy consumption in the means of renewable energy. Google controls over sixty-five percent of the search engines on the internet making it the biggest search engine in the world. They made their company so big in sight of their name "Google" from googolplex which is an insanely large number. Without Google, many would say they would just use the next search engine, but knowingly that it is an essential part of our everyday lives. Within the last few years, Google has been investing an entirely lot of money into their energy sector in search of those renewable energy sources. Just like all websites, there is a domain and with this domain there is a base of tangible hardware that these domains must stay stored. For Google, this hardware takes up an entire building as their website is so powerful and popular. SO one could imagine how much energy this would consume seeing as how these multiple data centers are running 24/7 throughout the day and night. New York Times published an article last year stating that all the datacenters together consume as much energy as up to ten nuclear power plants running at full capacity. Another statistic is that a single data center can take up more energy than Greensboro does. Google has a total of 13 data centers sprawled across the world. With this being noted, Google is intrigued more than ever to get a better, sustainable energy source than that they have today. Google announced that they were striving to have nine thousand solar panels to power their Mountain View California headquarters in 2007. This was the largest number of solar panels to ever power a building on record. Two years later they established Google Energy, their branch of research for alternative energy research. With this branch, they had invested over one billion dollars in their projects to make their energy consumption cleaner. One project of theirs was to purchase over two hundred and sixty megawatts of wind energy in wind farms. With this project, they produced over two gigawatts which was twice as much as they had used in the year 2011. The lead director of Google Energy, Rick Needham, had a conference to explain the necessity of switching to these new energy sources. He explained that while the amount of fossil fuels were going down overtime, the price of them were headed in the opposite direction. Renewable energy is needed as the price of it is heading down. He also was saying how efficient wind farming is. With the initial fee of purchase and with maintenance, there is no need for any excess purchases and can save a lot of money and hassle in the long run. Electric cars were a way to express a more realistic change to our everyday lives. They run about 240 electric cars in their buildings lowering their carbon footprint tremendously. They have also endeavored carpooling among the employees, totaling all these saving at over one billion dollars. Google plans to continue their venture to never discovered and renewable energy sources as time goes by.

http://theenergycollective.com/ecskris/202456/google-embraces-energy-industry