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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

#161

Post by EGreg »

You know my whole thing is about sustainability and looking to technology in the near future to shatter the conventional wisdom and assumptions of capitalism (and other systems) from the last several decades?

It's not as simple as saying you support companies doing this voluntarily. I also support that, very much so. But the governments have put up legal hurdles because in the past they "protected capitalism" and now just stand in the way.

State courts are used by telcos to sue cities to prevent Google Fiber from coming into the city, to protect the profits of the "private" interstate corporation from the "public" city.

Drug discovery and many other things are hampered by patents to protect the "intellectual property" of pharma corporations from the "freerider" researchers and public funding that would discover new cures.

And so forth and so on. The legal departments and regulations of the old capitalist system (set in place to protect innovation at a different time) is in the way of open source and open innovation of the 21st century.

And the biggest lie of course is jobs, that demand for human labor will never go down and that enough money will always trickle down to the plebes via wages.

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

#163

Post by downandout »

jartelt wrote: post #149
downandout wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with you, as do the facts. Show me what they can put on a balance sheet in the end.

There is value to signing a long term PPA that guarantees a set price of electricity for 10-20 years. For example, if Google powers a data center using wind power PPAs, they know exactly how much the electricity for the data center will cost over the life of those PPAs. If they power the data center with natural gas and coal-generated electricity bought through normal electricity markets, their electricity prices wil…

There's negative value to them if those PPA's are overpriced relative to conventional power. This article seems to reluctantly admit that they are indeed overpaying in most markets most of the time. "We saved money that one time in Chile" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement of the economics of renewables at the present time.

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

#164

Post by SamBam »

mda wrote: post #123
CPLX wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google is a much much larger energy consumer That seems implausible. The electrical requirements of Aluminum production are extreme. Obviously there's a lot of issues about where one draws the line between the company and its subcontractors and so on, but it seems hard to believe Apple's global energy footprint is not higher than Google's

I didn't know Apple produced its own aluminum.

The question is whether Apple's products affect the amount of aluminum extracted. If it does, then that aluminum's footprint belongs to Apple.

Likewise, you couldn't just keep buying big batteries from third parties to power all your needs, and claim to have no carbon footprint because you didn't make the batteries.

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

#165

Post by ChuckMcM »

matchagaucho wrote: post #148
ChuckMcM wrote: post #53

This is pretty awesome, Google is definitely leading the industry here. One of the more interesting things I learned while working for Google was the intricate way in which the "grid" is managed by a separate but co-operating set of entities. Google disrupted that happy bunch by creating a wholly owned subsidiary that was a licensed power company[1]. That gave it standing to buy from and sell energy to the grid and i…

Kind of buried in the article... but Google is claiming the net of their investments in renewable energy will offset their usage of fossil fuels. That's different than switching to a new energy source.

Does that change the message for you? As I see it the investments are the leading edge of the change over. So a combination of setting up a way to benefit from available clean energy (being a power company and being able to buy directly from the supplier), and investing in companies that produce clean energy or improve efficiency to keep the market moving so that the late adopters have something to adopt.

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

#166

Post by low_battery »

IBM wrote: post #132
mda wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't know Apple produced its own aluminum.

Apple includes their suppliers, retail stores, offices, and customers' product use in their carbon footprint (in addition to data centers) [1]: When we measure our carbon footprint, we include hundreds of suppliers, millions of customers, and hundreds of millions of devices. And we’re always looking for ways to make the biggest difference in five major areas: manufacturing, product use, facilities, transportation, an…

Edit: Correction by 3 orders of magnitude because of multiplication error :)

Then lets do a back of the envelope calculation for energy consumption for Apple's aluminum use.

Very roughly Apple sells ~25 million macs and ~200 million iphones per year. Again lets assume that it needs 2kg of aluminum for macbooks and 100g for phones (not all iphones are aluminum and this might be lower), that makes ~70 thousand metric tonnes of aluminum.

Modern smelters use 13KW/h to produce 1 kilogram of aluminum, but their production involves recycled aluminum (and possibly shavings from milling?) so number should be lower, lets say it is 10KWH per kilo.

This makes 70M*10KWh = 700GW/h year

Google's datacenter energy consumption, is difficult to guess, if there are 1 million servers, and assuming each server consumes 10KWH per day, then it makes ~3.5 TWH per year.

This is apples to oranges of course, aluminum vs server running energy costs, but still kinda implies that Google uses more energy, at least directly.

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

#167

Post by rocketraman »

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…

Unfortunately, there is indeed a lot of truth to the statement that it is a PR gimmick.

The problem with wind and solar is that they are intermittent. Therefore, Google's consumption at any particular moment in time cannot be supplied solely by these intermittent sources because their energy output never matches current demand (at least until some big honking batteries are built to level this out, for which the tech currently does not exist AFAIK -- no, Tesla's battery tech isn't even close to operating at this scale, though its a small step in that direction).

Therefore, Google must take power from the grid from non-intermittent sources that can ramp up and down based on demand, such as coal, gas, and nuclear. And this fact will remain true, even if Google had purchased wind and solar contracts for total energy many times greater than their total energy use.

So even though they may be purchasing contracts for wind/solar energy that exceed their own total energy use, they still cannot even approach viable operation without access to non-wind and solar sources, so its definitely misleading by Google to suggest they are running entirely on wind/solar.

Furthermore, the excess energy produced that Google purchased, but did not use because of the intermittency issue, actually reduces the efficiency of fossil and nuclear sources. Because the wind/solar energy is loaded onto the grid intermittently, it forces fossil and nuclear to cycle up and down to compensate. Just like city vs. highway driving, this is vastly less efficient.

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

#168

Post by [deleted] »

evanws wrote: post #107
kevinchen wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google is definitely leading the industry here. It's fantastic that Google plans to switch to renewables since they are one of the biggest players. Definitely an exaggeration to say that they are leading the charge. Apple was among the first to make renewables an issue and achieved 100% in data centers back in 2013, with little fanfare. http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/content-tracks/design-buil... And creating a…

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.

[deleted]

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

#169

Post by jjtheblunt »

evanws wrote: post #107
kevinchen wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google is definitely leading the industry here. It's fantastic that Google plans to switch to renewables since they are one of the biggest players. Definitely an exaggeration to say that they are leading the charge. Apple was among the first to make renewables an issue and achieved 100% in data centers back in 2013, with little fanfare. http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/content-tracks/design-buil... And creating a…

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.

citation for the assertion "Google is a much larger energy consumer" ?

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

#170

Post by mathattack »

Several years ago, I was very perplexed by Google investing in renewable energy. It was only later that I realized they use so much energy that this would have to be the wave of the future for tech companies like them. If they don't use renewables, they'll be subjects to the whims of energy markets similar to airlines. (Yes you can hedge, but even that is a bet)

Very forward looking of them!

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