Google Plans to Run Entirely on Renewable Energy by 2017

Photo credit: Martin Ollman / Contributorundefined
Photo credit: Martin Ollman / Contributorundefined

From Popular Mechanics

Google has announced that it plans to power its entire company with renewable energy in 2017.

Google is one of the largest companies in the world, and one of the costs associated with running a large company is energy. Google's energy costs are much higher than usual because in addition to powering its offices, Google also runs several large data servers in many parts of the world.

Those energy costs add up. Last year, Google and its parent company Alphabet used 5.2 terawatt hours, or 5,200 gigawatt hours, of electricity. That's enough electricity to power nearly half a million homes for the year.

Google has turned to renewable energy to meet its energy needs. Much of the company's electricity comes from contracts with 20 renewable energy companies around the world. Collectively, Google has purchased 2.6 gigawatts of power from these companies, more than any other corporation in the world.

In 2017, the company is aiming increase this amount, and purchase enough renewable energy to continuously power 100 percent of their facilities, becoming the first large corporation to do so.

Google has also explored methods to reduce its energy usage by increasing the energy efficiency of its data centers, such as by giving DeepMind's AI partial control of its maintenance. After all, there's no way that could possibly go wrong.

Source: Google via The Verge

You Might Also Like