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I was simply shocked to read that Google as a whole consumes as much as a whole metropolis. The fact that they're going green, is awesome on their part..!
Considering that they employ ~70k people, plus the hardware to run their business, that sounds about right.
I was simply shocked to read that Google as a whole consumes as much as a whole metropolis. The fact that they're going green, is awesome on their part..!
Unlike carbon-based power, Mr. Kava said, wind supply prices do not fluctuate, enabling Google to plan better. Can someone explain this? It seems like wind energy prices should fluctuate based on weather patterns (more wind == lower prices).
Once you spend the capital on wind turbine hardware and infrastructure, the price of your energy generation is fairly constant. Price on energy supply from fossil fuels always depends on the fluctuating price of those fuels, which introduces uncertainties to future costs of energy.
This is great progress and congratulations to Google. But Google and every other tech company is effectively still running on non-renewable energy by virtue of importing most of their hardware from places where manufacturing is done mostly with fossil fuels. All of us are outsourcing our pollution and CO2 production.
The hardware for green energy production included, like solar panels... Since they don't last for ever and need lots of energy to be produced, I wonder how long it takes to just get even.
Modern panels in decent locations are under 4 years.
This is great progress and congratulations to Google. But Google and every other tech company is effectively still running on non-renewable energy by virtue of importing most of their hardware from places where manufacturing is done mostly with fossil fuels. All of us are outsourcing our pollution and CO2 production.
The hardware for green energy production included, like solar panels... Since they don't last for ever and need lots of energy to be produced, I wonder how long it takes to just get even.
See e.g. https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/de/downloads/pdf-files/aktuell... http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35489.pdf http://www.volker-quaschning.de/datserv/kev/index.php
is there some kind of auditing authority that can actually guarantee that the money spent is actually going towards electrical generation and isn't just slush-fund cash that financial holding companies play around with while nominally saying "green energy"?
I was simply shocked to read that Google as a whole consumes as much as a whole metropolis. The fact that they're going green, is awesome on their part..!
This is great progress and congratulations to Google. But Google and every other tech company is effectively still running on non-renewable energy by virtue of importing most of their hardware from places where manufacturing is done mostly with fossil fuels. All of us are outsourcing our pollution and CO2 production.
Moving manufacturing and infrastructure from "dirty" to "green" is a transition process. It's infeasible to modify the entire supply chain to be non-renewable in one shot.
The entire world's economy is incredibly intertwined. The entire manufacturing stack won't be purely renewable until the entire world is running on renewable energy.