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Google says it will run entirely on renewable energy in 2017

nytimes.com

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Re: Google says it will run entirely on renewable energy in 2017

#151

Post by Ph0X »

kevinchen wrote: post #147
evanws wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be clear, 7% of Apple's global power is still dirty and they have not made any public commitment to bring that down any further. Google is a much much larger energy consumer, has been carbon neutral since 2007, and is going to use 100% renewables globally within the next year. Also, Google made its energy company play back in 2010. Apple made theirs in 2016.

Apple has pressured Foxconn to build out renewable capacity for certain steps of iPhone manufacturing by 2018. There is a lot of work to be done in manufacturing (much harder problem) but they have definitely made a public commitment to reduce the impact: https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2015/10/22Apple-Launches-Ne...

Let's just agree that both Apple and Google are doing fantastic jobs in this sector, and other big tech companies need to step it up.

Re: Google says it will run entirely on renewable energy in 2017

#152

Post by LightskinKanye »

ori_b wrote: post #95
kumarski wrote: post #91

There's a considerable amount of embodied energy and embodied pollution in Solar Panel and Wind Turbine construction. I think this is lost on most people in Silicon Valley.

Got a better alternative?

They have billions but aren't sponsoring scholarships for graduate physics degrees like Boeing or any "corporate" company does.

If they want to see their 10xs breakthroughs (which they sure talk a lot about) they should be throwing money at condensed matter physics research and just support in general for physics. Its easy to get a 10x in software but energy is a whole different game.

That way the smartest people won't have to decide between taking a high paying engineering/programming job or going into physics.

It all comes down to probabilities and the amount of people in the field is really the best approach towards making a breakthrough.

Re: Google says it will run entirely on renewable energy in 2017

#153

Post by nostrademons »

tylercubell wrote: post #65

> “In my mind it’s a P.R. gimmick,” said Chris Warren, vice president of communications at the Institute for Energy Research, a think tank in Washington supported largely by donations from individuals and companies in the fossil fuel industry. “If they think they can actually support themselves with wind and solar panels, they should connect them directly to their data centers.” I love how the author throws in a disc…

Well, it is a PR gimmick. I, for one, am glad for this PR gimmick and wish more companies would adopt similar PR gimmicks.

Re: Google says it will run entirely on renewable energy in 2017

#154

Post by philipkglass »

blazespin wrote: post #126
tylercubell wrote: post #65

> “In my mind it’s a P.R. gimmick,” said Chris Warren, vice president of communications at the Institute for Energy Research, a think tank in Washington supported largely by donations from individuals and companies in the fossil fuel industry. “If they think they can actually support themselves with wind and solar panels, they should connect them directly to their data centers.” I love how the author throws in a disc…

Yeah, or maybe Big Oil is just pretty evil.

I'd say the opposition right now is mostly Big Coal. If all coal and oil electrical generating capacity shut down and were replaced by renewables + gas it would be a net win for the oil and gas industry, because oil is a tiny fraction of electricity production and coal retirements boost gas demand. Gas is a flexible electricity source and a good complement to renewables. But a decade from now natural gas might be facing a significant competitive threat from renewables + storage.

Re: Google says it will run entirely on renewable energy in 2017

#155

Post by jdc0589 »

evanws wrote: post #119
snarkyturtle wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% renewables for their data centers . In the same way that Apple's total power is still partly dirty I'd think some of their offices won't be running entirely off the grid.

It isn't just data centers, they're going to hit 100% renewables for global operations. From Google's 2016 energy report: "And in 2017 Google will reach 100% renewable energy for our global operations..."

Its not just datacenters, but those are the biggest consumer of energy by a disproportionate amount.

Re: Google says it will run entirely on renewable energy in 2017

#156

Post by ocschwar »

downandout wrote: post #62

>"It’s good for the economy, good for business and good for our shareholders ". Let's be honest...it is not good for their shareholders. They are buying power at a significant premium and costing their shareholders money. It is a direct hit to the bottom line. This might be good for the environment - at the very least they are helping renewable energy companies get bank financing through purchase guarantees, which wi…

Renewables require that the production and consumption of energy be governed by a packet routing paradigm very similar to TCP/IP.

Google is already in that business.

Monetizing it in the energy sector will be very, very good for shareholders.

Re: Google says it will run entirely on renewable energy in 2017

#157

Post by acchow »

LightskinKanye wrote: post #141
ctdonath wrote: post #138

Is anyone discussing _reliability_? as in Google/Apple/etc are making this move not just "to be green" but to ensure that they do have power without being subjected to the whims & issues of providers when they're just one of many customers? When you have literally hundreds of millions (billions?) of customers, you want to ensure your own resources are absolutely reliable (within your, not someone else's, requirements…

You do realize in the event of a grid failure your solar panels don't work? You can either be grid tied or off grid.

Doesn't a battery give you some leeway to swap freely between buying/selling electricity off the grid and running-off-grid-from-battery?

Re: Google says it will run entirely on renewable energy in 2017

#158

Post by raisedbyninjas »

Another energy feather in Google's (and Dell's) cap was evangelizing on server room temperature. Recommending allowing air temps to climb up to 95F cuts a lot of the air cooling energy use. It also makes it more comfortable for those of use doomed to work in a chilled server room.

Re: Google says it will run entirely on renewable energy in 2017

#159

Post by hawski »

CydeWeys wrote: post #40
hawski wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm wondering if there are solar panel factory working entirely on solar energy. I'm not counting logistics of shipping manufactured panels to the customers for now.

Electricity is fungible though. Why does it matter? By virtue of the product they're putting out they're saving significantly more lifetime fossil fuel resources than they're using.

It does not matter. It's just nice. Maybe not as much as self-hosting compiler or 3d printer able to make copies of itself. Of course electrical energy alone is not enough to build a solar panel, but it's just pleasant for the thought.

Re: Google says it will run entirely on renewable energy in 2017

#160

Post by usrusr »

coldpie wrote: post #34
tomp wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price = where supply and demand cross. If there's no wind, supply goes down, so with constant demand prices will go up! That's disregarding second-order effects (e.g. other providers marking up their prices to make bigger profits, or the wind-power provider increasing its prices in the future to make up for the lost income and provide a nice return on investment).

You can predict the supply of wind, as an average over a long enough period of time, much more easily than you can predict the supply of oil.

But will that prediction enable you to scale demand? With increasing hardware lifecycles, it might one day be economic for a global like Google to overprovision datacenters enough to be able to shift compute load to wherever intermittent energy is available. Requests can be routed over much longer distances than energy. But I suspect that Moore's law just isn't dead enough yet to make it economical to keep large datacenters offline just to wait for locally favorable energy prices. And on this scale, economical is a pretty good first approximation of ecological.
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