About carbon dioxide and renewable energy

Already in 2007 we (Google) approached voluntarily decided to implement a program to reduce CO2 emissions into the atmosphere, and we also took the responsibility to call for the rest to this, starting in every possible way to help solve environmental problems.

We approach this problem from three sides. First, we minimize our own energy consumption - after all, we have built the most energy-efficient data center in the world. Secondly, we are trying to feed our facilities from renewable sources *: this is what we did, for example, in Mountain View, where we used one of the largest solar farms . And finally, we decided to minimize carbon emissions where it is impossible to completely get rid of the negative impact on the environment.

We have just finished writing a 20-year green energy plan, which will allow us, on the one hand, to commit to reducing the carbon footprint, and on the other, to promote the growth of the renewable energy sector in every possible way.

On July 30th, we will start buying electricity from the NextEra Energy Resources wind farm (114 megawatts) from Iowa at a predetermined cost of 20 years. This amount of energy will be sufficient to operate multiple data centers.
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By concluding a contract for such a long period (and this implies impressive financial investments), we provide developers with financial support, thereby encouraging it to build new projects related to “clean” energy.

The impossibility of attracting large companies (and, hence, large contracts) has long been a brake on the development of renewable energy. We are very pleased that we have concluded such a large contract for such a long period of time and we assume that this will cause a revival in the market of "clean" energy, which will lead to the emergence of new producers and new consumers of this type of resources.

Yes, Google needs a lot of energy to keep our services running. That is why we pay so close attention to sabzh, and we are happy to start moving in the right, in our opinion, direction.

via googleblog.blogspot.com by Urs Hoelzle, Senior Vice President, Operations.

* The _{article uses the word renewable, which translates as “renewable”, although everyone who taught geography in CIS schools used to classify the sun and wind as resources “inexhaustible.” Apparently, Google does not make such a distinction.}