Google Set To Reach 100% Renewable Energy

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You have to hand it to Google, using 100% renewable energy for all its operations by 2017 is pretty damn impressive. Considering the massive amount of electricity the company uses, going 100% renewable couldn't have been an easy feat.

I’m thrilled to announce that in 2017 Google will reach 100% renewable energy for our global operations — including both our data centers and offices. 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.
 
So does this mean that Google shuts down when it's cloudy or when the wind stops blowing?
 
nutzo said:
So does this mean that Google shuts down when it's cloudy or when the wind stops blowing?
Click to expand...
Nah, Google just buys whatever electricity generation mix is available from the local grid and then buys offsets or pays a premium to some electricity provider for enough renewabless to offset its usage, allowing it to pat itself on the back.
 
nutzo said:
So does this mean that Google shuts down when it's cloudy or when the wind stops blowing?
Click to expand...

While being uninformed on how renewable energy works. You're probably a climate change denier as well. Due to various advancements and system improvements, the scenarios described above aren't a major issue anymore, and haven't been for awhile. You may want to start researching on what has happened in the last 10 years.. Especially in relations to Tesla and its sister (soon to be merged) companies. The Tesla island is a great real-life product demonstration to start with.
 
Wow this is awesome... especially for such a a large organisation, this is seriously impressive.
 
Chunder said:
While being uninformed on how renewable energy works. You're probably a climate change denier as well. Due to various advancements and system improvements, the scenarios described above aren't a major issue anymore, and haven't been for awhile.
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Only if you have enough dispatchable electricity generation to cover up when unreliable renewables like wind and solar don't work. Denmark does it with foreign hydro and coal, Germany does it with coal, and South Australia keeps on screwing up with two major blackouts in 3 months.

You may want to start researching on what has happened in the last 10 years..
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Virtually nothing has happened in storage, the only way to store large amounts electricity remains pumped hydro. That tiny island of 600 poor people living near the equator has little bearing with a large developed country that requires large amounts of cheap, reliable electricity to operate.
 
Does this mean the Fossil energy cartels will have their pet courts and politicians hold them hostage for payola like the did to MGM?
 
This showed up in today's Oklahoman. Its a nice paperwork shuffle. OK gets most of its power from coal, nat gas or wind. Times with zero or light wind only leaves the other two options. So while Google may on paper buy enough wind electricity to cover 100% of their overall usage, there will be times when they are using carbon based power.
 
Kind of crazy that they're using 2.6 gigawatts of power.

Yet California is running down the pipeline of charging a "high energy surcharge" if I use more than 4 time the average household worth of power.
 
SLee said:
Nah, Google just buys whatever electricity generation mix is available from the local grid and then buys offsets or pays a premium to some electricity provider for enough renewabless to offset its usage, allowing it to pat itself on the back.
Click to expand...

And that was exactly my point.

They pay extra for power and shuffle paperwork so they can pretend that they are running on renewables. Doesn't matter that there is no way they can be running 24x7 on just renewables.
 
Yeah, they pay some wind farm in Flyover State, USA instead of the local electric company, even though the energy actually comes from the local sources and then everyone in Flyover, USA gets the wind energy. Damn it must be nice to be able to do that as a corporation. Hell I'd buy energy from those massive coal plants back east that are a fraction of the cost of the electricity out here.
 
nutzo said:
So does this mean that Google shuts down when it's cloudy or when the wind stops blowing?
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Solar is just one type of renewable energy. There's also wind power. Plus I'm sure Google is smart enough to have batteries to store the power.
 
Did a wind turbine kill Nutzo's family or something?

OG&E offers the same thing to regular customers. They provide a mix of power. You can pay more to offset some or all of your electricity use to wind power. They're starting a solar farm now, too.
 
Steve said:
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.
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I wonder if someone finds this news article and reads it in 1000 years, and they'll think, that "damn they had time travel technology 1000 years ago already, how did it get lost?"
 
nutzo said:
And that was exactly my point.

They pay extra for power and shuffle paperwork so they can pretend that they are running on renewables. Doesn't matter that there is no way they can be running 24x7 on just renewables.
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You probably never heard but humans have the technology to actually store energy to later convert into electricity.

I don't get all the animosity towards renewables especially on a tech forum.

Even if they only pay renewable energy providers to offset their usage, that's still more than doing nothing, so how one can spin this as a bad thing is beyond me.
 
The actual generators have advanced significantly yes.. The storage technologies have not.
People on a technology forum naturally have a basic understanding of technology and its primary issues. In this case batteries have a very serious concern currently with storage safety. Electricity is not stored 100% safely once it is generated. IE every battery ever made over a certain capacity is basically a bomb. When the device is a D cell battery this is a non factor. When it is a 2000mAh lithium battery it suddenly is a hand grenade. Now consider how much power storage is required for 24/hr operation of a 2.6 GIGAWATT facility.

No. Google does not have storage on site to counter failure of renewable. That would be an engineering stupidity. Not to mention the amount of battery cells required to run such a building would require their own building.
They use on site or off site generation most likely of a non renewable source.
 
Aside from the accounting "magic" that Alphabet is doing to pull this off, the idea that solar and wind electricity generation is "renewable" is a myth. The rare earth metals for the solar panels and the high capacity batteries have to come from somewhere, and all those have a limited life span until they have to be replaced. The steel for the wind turbines have to come from somewhere, and they sure aren't going to be using "renewable" energy to produce that steel. People who think that using these technologies to replace coal, petroleum, and natural gas will somehow "save the planet" are delusional.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
Did a wind turbine kill Nutzo's family or something?

OG&E offers the same thing to regular customers. They provide a mix of power. You can pay more to offset some or all of your electricity use to wind power. They're starting a solar farm now, too.
Click to expand...

Maybe he's batman, then the answer is yes.

Wind turbines are murdering bats in massive quantities, Ontario has even found the rate of deaths unacceptable and they are pro hippies. Wind turbines as they are currently need to be severely changed, in Alberta we had something like 200 ducks land in a tailings pond, due to a system to keep them away failing, who then go sick, hippies lost their mind. Yet tens of thousands of bats dying is acceptable as it is part of their agenda.
 
M76 said:
You probably never heard but humans have the technology to actually store energy to later convert into electricity.

I don't get all the animosity towards renewables especially on a tech forum.
Click to expand...

I don't get it either, but it's not new behavior. Under Carter the White House was getting most of it's hot water from solar heaters. The Reagan administration came in and ripped them off. There was nothing wrong with the solar heaters (they were saved and are actually still in use at a museum somewhere), conservatives just wanted it off the White House roof because it didn't fit their ideology.

shad0w4life said:
Maybe he's batman, then the answer is yes.

Wind turbines are murdering bats in massive quantities....
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Domestic cats kill billions of birds and bats and other animals every year. How about we just cut back on the domesticated animal population a tiny bit and keep the turbines?
 
Just something to think about, since it might not be obvious.

They are not using wind generated electricity. They are using energy that was most likely generated by coal or nuclear and then paying a renewable energy company to pump into the grid an equal amount.

You can't direct electrons from a particular power station to your equipment. It's just something to think about when you buy renewable energy, unless you have the generator on your property, you are not getting energy from that provider. Don't get too high and mighty about saving the Earth.
 
westrock2000 said:
Just something to think about, since it might not be obvious.

They are not using wind generated electricity. They are using energy that was most likely generated by coal or nuclear and then paying a renewable energy company to pump into the grid an equal amount.

You can't direct electrons from a particular power station to your equipment. It's just something to think about when you buy renewable energy, unless you have the generator on your property, you are not getting energy from that provider. Don't get too high and mighty about saving the Earth.
Click to expand...

Isn't that... obvious? You're paying extra to have the power company generate a certain amount of energy from renewable sources. You don't get to decide which power goes where when, but the net result is the same.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
Isn't that... obvious? You're paying extra to have the power company generate a certain amount of energy from renewable sources. You don't get to decide which power goes where when, but the net result is the same.
Click to expand...

You're not paying extra, the prices are comparable. You're paying a company for electricity that comes from 100% wind or solar (most likely in America). But you are not getting that electricity. Many people DO NOT realize that. They think they are getting electricity from the company they buy it from.
 
I'm certainly not anti-renewable.

I'm all for it where it makes sense. Google volunteering to pay for renewable power, I'm all for. It's a great step for them, and a great investment in renewable technology. A person or company either paying and installing it themselves, or volunteering to pay more to offset their energy usage, I think is the right approach. Sure, Google isn't actually "using" 100% renewable, it's just a big paperwork shuffle that has a lot of marketing impact, but I still think it's a good step to be taking. The fallacy is that Google isn't mentioning if they are also investing in sufficient backup resources to handle their power loads when the wind isn't blowing - the wind turbines and solar panels are not even half of the total cost of using renewable power.

Renewables are not cheap. Sure, you could say the price of solar has gone down a lot in recent years - it really has, and it's amazing. But you still gotta run at night, so for every solar farm, you still have to have that big carbon-producing power plant to support behind it -- only now instead of being able to leverage massive economy of scale and have a 1-3GW plant sitting baseloaded and operating efficiently all day long, it has to startup/shutdown and swing, very rapidly, with changes in solar output. Or you are paying even more for batteries to be able to store excess renewable, and hope you have enough storage to ride through (which is the holy grail, but the energy storage technology just isn't there yet). And there's distribution - getting power from that wind farm in OK to where it needs to go isn't cheap, and the distribution and infrastructure network isn't set up for it right now. High voltage transmission lines run $1M+/mile to run, not to mention often take a decade to get through permitting, land rights, environmental impact studies, and so forth. So it's not just the cost of your solar panels when you are looking at supporting the entire grid with renewables.

I'm not happy with many current policies regarding renewables, but I have to admit, I can't think of anything that would be perfect. Policies like California's Renewable Portfolio Standard push that cost off onto all ratepayers; the state isn't actually paying for it, and it certainly isn't affecting the bottom line of the utility companies, and I don't think anyone who drafted or voted in the policy actually understood what the total cost would really be to implement that standard. There have been several recent bids in California territory to build smaller solar farms, so they could offer a renewable alternative to those that couldn't afford solar themselves; which sounds good when you put it that way, but in reality, it was being installed and targeted towards areas where most of the ratepayers are on CARE (the low income subsidized energy rate), so they can have the option of paying even more to offset their power usage with renewables as well, which ok, but they can't afford to pay their full utility bill as it is already - all so the utility can have more available solar in their portfolio to help them meet that Renewable Portfolio Standard and not actually have to pay anything out of pocket to do it. And then you have concepts like the carbon market (Cap-and-Trade) that Quebec/California are in, which haven't quite worked out the way they intended, and create a lot of uncertainty for large industry and don't really do anything to curtail carbon use.
 
Nafensoriel said:
The actual generators have advanced significantly yes.. The storage technologies have not.
People on a technology forum naturally have a basic understanding of technology and its primary issues. In this case batteries have a very serious concern currently with storage safety. Electricity is not stored 100% safely once it is generated. IE every battery ever made over a certain capacity is basically a bomb. When the device is a D cell battery this is a non factor. When it is a 2000mAh lithium battery it suddenly is a hand grenade. Now consider how much power storage is required for 24/hr operation of a 2.6 GIGAWATT facility.

No. Google does not have storage on site to counter failure of renewable. That would be an engineering stupidity. Not to mention the amount of battery cells required to run such a building would require their own building.
They use on site or off site generation most likely of a non renewable source.
Click to expand...
That's a very pessimistic and one sided look at batteries. Lithium batteries existed for ages. All my laptops and most cordless electronic devices used lithium batteries with varying sizes and capacities for decades. And you guessed it none exploded. And I didn't think of them as hand grenades ever.

Perhaps the recent samsung fiasco generated this craze I don't know, but one engineering failure doesn't mean a technology suddenly becomes bad. If that were true we wouldn't have any suspension bridges since the tacoma bridge collapse.

The reason these batteries become volatile is because they're trying to reduce size cutting corners. don't including necessary safety circuits and actual physical damage. These are not really issues of industrial size energy stores. Because you have all the space you need to make the faculty safe, and to include the neccessary circuits, and they're not exposed to physical damage like a car battery, phone battery, or even a model/drone battery.

Plus energy doesn't necessarily have to be stored in batteries there are other ways to store excess power that can be implemented in industrial facilities. For example potential energy.
 
Chunder said:
While being uninformed on how renewable energy works. You're probably a climate change denier as well. Due to various advancements and system improvements, the scenarios described above aren't a major issue anymore, and haven't been for awhile. You may want to start researching on what has happened in the last 10 years.. Especially in relations to Tesla and its sister (soon to be merged) companies. The Tesla island is a great real-life product demonstration to start with.
Click to expand...
He may be, but he's not wrong. Google is still connected to the grid and they will still buy energy when necessary, though I'm sure they have batteries to store some power, but I'd be shocked if they have enough to keep every one of their data centers running 24x7 no matter what the weather conditions are.
 
Brian_B said:
I'm certainly not anti-renewable.

I'm all for it where it makes sense. Google volunteering to pay for renewable power, I'm all for. It's a great step for them, and a great investment in renewable technology. A person or company either paying and installing it themselves, or volunteering to pay more to offset their energy usage, I think is the right approach. Sure, Google isn't actually "using" 100% renewable, it's just a big paperwork shuffle that has a lot of marketing impact, but I still think it's a good step to be taking. The fallacy is that Google isn't mentioning if they are also investing in sufficient backup resources to handle their power loads when the wind isn't blowing - the wind turbines and solar panels are not even half of the total cost of using renewable power.

Renewables are not cheap. Sure, you could say the price of solar has gone down a lot in recent years - it really has, and it's amazing. But you still gotta run at night, so for every solar farm, you still have to have that big carbon-producing power plant to support behind it -- only now instead of being able to leverage massive economy of scale and have a 1-3GW plant sitting baseloaded and operating efficiently all day long, it has to startup/shutdown and swing, very rapidly, with changes in solar output. Or you are paying even more for batteries to be able to store excess renewable, and hope you have enough storage to ride through (which is the holy grail, but the energy storage technology just isn't there yet). And there's distribution - getting power from that wind farm in OK to where it needs to go isn't cheap, and the distribution and infrastructure network isn't set up for it right now. High voltage transmission lines run $1M+/mile to run, not to mention often take a decade to get through permitting, land rights, environmental impact studies, and so forth. So it's not just the cost of your solar panels when you are looking at supporting the entire grid with renewables.

I'm not happy with many current policies regarding renewables, but I have to admit, I can't think of anything that would be perfect. Policies like California's Renewable Portfolio Standard push that cost off onto all ratepayers; the state isn't actually paying for it, and it certainly isn't affecting the bottom line of the utility companies, and I don't think anyone who drafted or voted in the policy actually understood what the total cost would really be to implement that standard. There have been several recent bids in California territory to build smaller solar farms, so they could offer a renewable alternative to those that couldn't afford solar themselves; which sounds good when you put it that way, but in reality, it was being installed and targeted towards areas where most of the ratepayers are on CARE (the low income subsidized energy rate), so they can have the option of paying even more to offset their power usage with renewables as well, which ok, but they can't afford to pay their full utility bill as it is already - all so the utility can have more available solar in their portfolio to help them meet that Renewable Portfolio Standard and not actually have to pay anything out of pocket to do it. And then you have concepts like the carbon market (Cap-and-Trade) that Quebec/California are in, which haven't quite worked out the way they intended, and create a lot of uncertainty for large industry and don't really do anything to curtail carbon use.
Click to expand...

Renewables aren't cheap? I get my power from Green Mountain (which buys offsets for any energy that's not from a renewable source) and it's the cheapest deal I can get on electricity and I'm in TX if that matters.
 
jardows said:
Aside from the accounting "magic" that Alphabet is doing to pull this off, the idea that solar and wind electricity generation is "renewable" is a myth. The rare earth metals for the solar panels and the high capacity batteries have to come from somewhere, and all those have a limited life span until they have to be replaced. The steel for the wind turbines have to come from somewhere, and they sure aren't going to be using "renewable" energy to produce that steel. People who think that using these technologies to replace coal, petroleum, and natural gas will somehow "save the planet" are delusional.
Click to expand...

If we cant save all of it lets waste off all it? I always found that kinda of argument funny.

- Police don't stop all crimes. Lets drop the police
- Traffic-signals don't save all lives in intersections. Lets drop those as well.
- Trucks don't transport cargo without an accidental damgae here and there. Let stop all trucks from transporting cargo.

Come on only 100% PERFECTLY solutions or BUST right...
 
M76 said:
Even if they only pay renewable energy providers to offset their usage, that's still more than doing nothing, so how one can spin this as a bad thing is beyond me.
Click to expand...

Becuase people then would have to consider how they are wasteful themselves and that is to much to admit, so happy ignorance is a lot better.
 
M76 said:
That's a very pessimistic and one sided look at batteries. Lithium batteries existed for ages. All my laptops and most cordless electronic devices used lithium batteries with varying sizes and capacities for decades. And you guessed it none exploded. And I didn't think of them as hand grenades ever.

Perhaps the recent samsung fiasco generated this craze I don't know, but one engineering failure doesn't mean a technology suddenly becomes bad. If that were true we wouldn't have any suspension bridges since the tacoma bridge collapse.

The reason these batteries become volatile is because they're trying to reduce size cutting corners. don't including necessary safety circuits and actual physical damage. These are not really issues of industrial size energy stores. Because you have all the space you need to make the faculty safe, and to include the neccessary circuits, and they're not exposed to physical damage like a car battery, phone battery, or even a model/drone battery.

Plus energy doesn't necessarily have to be stored in batteries there are other ways to store excess power that can be implemented in industrial facilities. For example potential energy.
Click to expand...

Wrong direction of thinking. Battery safety directly scales with the amount of storage you have at any given moment. Your cell phone is a low risk factor yet its potential damage is quite high considering its size. A house sized lithium battery is quite capable of causing devastating structural damage to a home even though its failure rate would also be quite low(in fact lower than a cellphone since size generally increases lithium battery stability due to various factors).
/edit I realized i gave no context for the home battery cell. At current technology a home lithium battery stack would equate roughly in risk to a hot water heater. Hence its something you will see exist simply because it has finally reached a safety threshold deemed acceptable for home use. A business grade battery stack would have to be considerably larger(business applications generally focus on function then efficiency thus requiring more stored energy to use ratio than a home system) and thus the inherent risk factor is not acceptable at this time unless you are willing to shoulder incredible costs to defend against the rare failure either in compensation or prevention.

A battery bank capable of keeping a server farm up for 24 hrs? Even considering its risk factor is low a failure would be by definition catastrophic. We limit the amount of explosive chemicals allowed to be stored in one place for a reason. The same logic actually carries over to batteries as well. This fictitious ideology that we can store commercial or industrial levels of energy is extremely dangerous. The material sciences are just not there yet. This is why we still use lithium, lead, and nicad as primary high energy storage systems. It's not that we dont WANT better batteries.. its just we CANT build them yet. The materials to build them just do not exist at the moment and the technology we DO have has rather harsh limitations when you start thinking of grid level storage.

The other side of the coin is efficiency. Batteries really do not qualify for this label. This is made worse when you consider the amount of transmission required by renewables(very few farms actually exist close to population centers).

To be entirely honest nuclear, geothermal, and tidal(theoretical) are the only truly reliable renewable power sources. Then again people hate nuclear because they cant understand it, dont want geothermal because it sounds more complex than it really is, and tidal power is so new it squeaks.
 
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nilepez said:
Renewables aren't cheap? I get my power from Green Mountain (which buys offsets for any energy that's not from a renewable source) and it's the cheapest deal I can get on electricity and I'm in TX if that matters.
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It's because TX - you guys have more Wind power than you can deal with, and it's all stuck in ERCOT territory with bottlenecked distribution. There's a long story there, but essentially, if your on the right side of that bottleneck, and the wind is blowing, you could see free power, because they are trying to find places to get it to go, or shutting down the turbines to keep from destabilizing the grid from overpower. And TX has a lot of natural gas and aren't afraid to use it, so they have plenty of non-renewable to back up their infrastructure in case the wind were to ever stop blowing

That is a good problem to have, and a much better RPS model than California has adopted. It isn't focused on carbon reduction at any price, it's focused on cheap and reliable power.
 
How about storing excess energy in some other form? A physical battery like water above a turbine. Or convert it into hydrogen for later, and portable use.

I'm not saying I have the answers. How about them, really?
 
SLee said:
Nah, Google just buys whatever electricity generation mix is available from the local grid and then buys offsets or pays a premium to some electricity provider for enough renewabless to offset its usage, allowing it to pat itself on the back.
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I was about to say, you can do the same in Texas in powertochoose by selecting "Renewable 100%" filter, and its surprisingly not that expensive. Right now there's big subsidies still in effect, so those savings can be passed on to the consumer, costing only about 11 cents per KWH, compared to say 8 cents on traditional energy sources.

Granted, you're still paying for those subsidies in taxes, but everyone is forced to whether you use renewable or not.
CombatChrisNC said:
How about storing excess energy in some other form? A physical battery like water above a turbine. Or convert it into hydrogen for later, and portable use.
Click to expand...
There's massive amounts of money and brainpower being invested in this. Working against you is the basic physics law that essentially states "you can't even break even" when converting one form of energy into another.
 
SLee said:
Nah, Google just buys whatever electricity generation mix is available from the local grid and then buys offsets or pays a premium to some electricity provider for enough renewabless to offset its usage, allowing it to pat itself on the back.
Click to expand...

Because Google is Good. and Google IS your friend.

/sarc
 
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