181–190 of 273 posts
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.
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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.
Yes, it is leading edge and admirable. I applaud the effort but question the headline. A Google datacenter near the Columbia River may derive 100% of it's energy from hydro. Google pioneered that practice and many others followed. But their overall real estate footprint relies heavily on local energy suppliers, which may be coal. Any company making a claim of being 100% renewable, is basically just using offsets. And…
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These are quite common here in Germany.
What's the cost increase like? Do you know anyone doing it?
1095 € for the local "default contract" [1]
1060 € for a one-year contract from the local default provider
1080 € for their "eco option"
792 € for the cheapest offer overall [2]
855 € for the cheapest 100 % renewable
1040 € for a reputable 100 % renewable provider that has the certification supported by most environmental organisations
[2] (which is tricksy, since it is a package deal with massive overage fees, not mostly a flat fee per kWh like the others)
So there is quite a potential for savings by picking the right provider, and high-quality eco options are among the more expensive ones, but if you do research you probably can find a compromise you like. E.g. the expensive eco providers often earmark 3 % or so of the price for long-term investments in building their own projects, instead of only reselling electricity provided by others, which of course adds on top and some people want to support. Some accept biogas as a power source, others don't.
And since many people never cared and pay the default deals, when they think about switching for eco reasons the shock isn't as big, because they often can save and get something 100 % renewable. Many people are willing to pay 20-50 € extra and go for that if available. The expensive options obviously have fewer customers, but I know people from all categories.
> “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…
It's true that there's a storage problem to be solved. That doesn't mean that every single renewables project needs to solve it or become a gimmick.
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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.
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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 t…
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> 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…
In Europe Apple are considered far from 'green' due to the problem of the power adaptors. Every other phone or tablet sold in the E.U. has a sensible power adaptor, usually the mini USB flavour. Apple though, they don't think the law applies to them, or at least not the spirit of the law, so they keep churning out these Apple only power adaptors complete with the cables that fray and break a lot easier than normal ca…
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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.
Yes, it is leading edge and admirable. I applaud the effort but question the headline. A Google datacenter near the Columbia River may derive 100% of it's energy from hydro. Google pioneered that practice and many others followed. But their overall real estate footprint relies heavily on local energy suppliers, which may be coal. Any company making a claim of being 100% renewable, is basically just using offsets. And…
You argue that by being physically near the Columbia river, a hydro electric plant can be constructed which generates power and sends it directly to a Google data center. But their other properties, some of which are nearer power plants which generate power using fossil fuels can not be considered to be using renewable energy. Is that about right?
If so, I see it a bit differently, if Google builds a concentrated solar plant in the Mohave Desert and that plant puts adds 1200MWhrs of energy to the Western Grid every month, and Google's real estate in California consume 1000MWhrs of energy from the grid every month, I can see that being claimed as using 100% renewable energy. There isn't a specific path of the electrons to the Google buildings but in that scenario Google will have added more energy through renewable sources into the grid than they extracted from the grid[1]
I've got Solar panels on my house and they generate more power during the day than I can use, they generate no power at night. I have them connected to the grid. When I'm generating excess power its probably being used by my neighbors but somewhere nearby a fossil fuel plant is using less fuel because of the power I am feeding into the grid.
Because is is set up this way, PG&E bills me on an annual basis and on that basis the 'net' amount of energy my house uses is quite small, in terms of ratios, over 90% of my total electrical energy usage is accounted for by the energy I generate on my rooftop. I think of that as "90%" of my energy comes from renewable sources, even though every night, at that moment, I'm using fossil fuel sources (or simply the grid). Once I have a couple of PowerWall's install it will get a bit more explicit but I consider both interpretations valid. I'm guessing from your argument that you do not.
[1] You can also argue that the 2nd law of thermodynamics tells us that adding it and then removing it will leave a bit behind so perhaps a draw of 1MWhr might need an input of 1.2MWr in order to offset grid losses to radiation and heat.
Wondering if any residential provider in the world is offering a service where you can say "sell me only renewables". There'd probably be a cost associated with this, but I think I'd have to consider it if it were available locally.
Google is ahead of the game here. Other tech companies also are moving to renewables but they're not at 100% yet (IIRC). The key point is that as cloud computing becomes commoditized and people build tools to quickly transfer from one cloud provider to another, the profit margin will become smaller and smaller until energy costs dominate the cost to provide a service. It is already the case that a machine will use mo…
Apple (smaller server park, but does that matter?) claims 93% over 2015, so they can't be far behind. http://images.apple.com/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental_... : "For starters, as of January 2016, we’re sourcing or generating enough renewable energy to cover 93 percent of the electricity we use at our facilities worldwide. In fact, Apple is now 100 percent renewable in 23 countries, including China, Germany, Si…
Yeah, they rank on the list, but they're pretty far behind.