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Google is officially 100% sun and wind powered – 3.0 gigawatts worth

electrek.co

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Re: Google is officially 100% sun and wind powered – 3.0 gigawatts worth

#21

Post by bhhaskin »

m0llusk wrote: post #17

This is great progress, but there are still some significant low hanging fruit to consider. For example, the power it takes to display the all white background of the search and other top Google pages is significant. Changing that to black or partly black or some darker color could save amounts of energy that are hard to calculate and represent draw from all over the network.

The largest power drain in an LCD/LED screen is the backlight and that has to be running regardless of which color is being displayed. This would only benefit OLED screen (which doesn't have a normal backlight) which are pretty much only used on high-end phones and TVs. Unlikely to make a significant impact in energy use, and furthermore any amount of energy savings would likely be lost in the extra amount of black ink needed to print out pages.

Re: Google is officially 100% sun and wind powered – 3.0 gigawatts worth

#23

Post by fulafel »

allenz wrote: post #9
fulafel wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incidentally, this is close to how it works (at least around my part of the world) when you as a residential customer choose to buy solar/wind generated electricity. The retail electricity providers sell you electricity from a spot market (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_market#Wholesale_e... ) and you pay the local power comapny to send you the electricity over the national grid. BTW there's a big diff…

3 GW measures average power. Google just buys the entire output of wind or solar farms, so supply is not matched with demand.[1] This is a known problem with renewables. Elon Musk claims that he can solve it with a relatively small area of batteries like the Powerpack, but he's sold less than 1 GW so far because batteries are expensive. [1] https://environment.google/projects/announcement-100/

I guess that accounting is natural for marketing numbers.

I don't generally think it's a problem, it's just a feature of those generation methods and just means we need overprovisioning. Whereas fossil fuels have unsurmountable problems and cause untold human suffering, famines and damage to the environment.

Re: Google is officially 100% sun and wind powered – 3.0 gigawatts worth

#25

Post by drwl »

cdancette wrote: post #19

Why do they sell at loss? Is the energy they buy from the grid cheaper than the energy they buy from renewable sources? And do they just make an exchange with the grid for the same amount of energy?

My guess is that sometimes it costs money to provide energy. I would imagine it has to do with supply and demand at that time.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601221/texas-and-californ...

Re: Google is officially 100% sun and wind powered – 3.0 gigawatts worth

#26

Post by dastbe »

murph-almighty wrote: post #4

This is amazing, especially considering their cloud services. Powering an entire datacenter on renewable can NOT be easy. Does Amazon have a similar initiative? Given their market share in the cloud and their widespread AZ's I imagine it'd be tricky. edit: jk, apparently their energy needs are half that of Google and they're making headway. ( https://electrek.co/2017/10/19/amazon-wind-farm/ )

I think your math on that last bit is off. The article states they have 1.2GW, which is somewhere between 40% and 50% of Amazon's power usage (started 2016 at 40%, expect to exit at 50%). That would peg 100% at somewhere between 2.4 and 3.

Re: Google is officially 100% sun and wind powered – 3.0 gigawatts worth

#27

Post by toomuchtodo »

cdancette wrote: post #18
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some cost to integrating renewables into the grid, though most experts seem to suggest the first 80% or so isn't that hard, and we're so far away from that in most places that the positive externalities massively outweigh any negative. If people did use this model to get to 100% then presumably the final 20% or so would be more expensive, since you'd still be paying grid prices for your usage, then selling t…

Thanks ! And why do they sell at loss the energy ? Does this mean that they just exchange the energy they buy for grid energy to power their datacenter, and that the energy they get is cheaper than the one they're buying?

The spot price of power changes by the minute. Google pays for the wind farm's output; they're more concerned about replacing dirty MWs with clean MWs, and less about if they're making a profit on each MWh of power.

Re: Google is officially 100% sun and wind powered – 3.0 gigawatts worth

#28

Post by allenz »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #11
allenz wrote: post #6

Great work. Specifically, Google purchases 3 GW of renewable energy and sells it to the grid at a loss.[1] This isn't the same as being directly powered by renewables because they don't have to worry about time shifting supply and demand, which is often done using natural gas. [1] cloud.google.com/environment/

A more important caveat is that it's only talking about their electricity usage, presumably people still drive to work in ICE cars, fly airplanes, ship devices around the world, the accounting for even just electricity usage can extend out to suppliers and suppliers of suppliers etc. But it's still a very good thing and others should follow suit. Also, can you show your working for them "selling at a loss". They gene…

Google's report from 2013, cited from their blog, says that they resell electricity at a "slight net loss".[1]

I didn't compare to buying RECs. The point is that Google is 100% renewable voluntarily. While RECs may be worth some tax credits, it's obviously a net cost or else Facebook would also be 100% renewable.

That said, I'm fairly confident that Google's approach is more costly than just buying RECs because demand for RECs is not very high. Google doesn't buy RECs directly because they want stronger guarantees of additionality:

"Buying a few years’ worth of RECs from a renewable project does not provide the stable and sizable cash stream that a renewable project developer needs to get financing to build new green power projects. In a PPA [power purchasing agreement], Google is agreeing to buy all the power from a project for many years. Google has, in effect, totally accepted the power price risk that the project owner would otherwise face—instead of taking the risk of selling into the power market on a short-term basis, Google is providing the seller with a guaranteed revenue stream for 20 years. This is something the developer can literally take to the bank. If we were to buy only the RECs, this would represent a fraction of the value of a typical power project,5 and would still leave the renewable developer to face the market risks of future energy prices, making it much harder for them to obtain financing for projects.

[1] http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...

Re: Google is officially 100% sun and wind powered – 3.0 gigawatts worth

#29

Post by allenz »

cosmic_ape wrote: post #15
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if they were powering their data-centers directly from renewable sources, bypassing the grid, it would still be a form of philanthropy to whatever degree it raises their cost beyond burning coal and dumping the pollution on someone else. Since global warming is a global problem (and other forms of pollution from burning coal or gas can travel long distances) it doesn't matter where the carbon is saved, it's basi…

Thanks, this explains it. Do you think there are numbers somewhere about how much carbon is saved globally due to this? Them selling the energy may drive down the prices, increasing demand. So it could be that more energy is consumed at the same carbon level, rather then less carbon emitted. Perhaps they are paying for someone's bitcoin mining.

Google's approach subsidizes the additional cost of renewable energy sources over fossil fuels. Because Google sells exactly what they consume, they aren't actually inducing more electricity demand. And even if that was a factor, renewables are still an order of magnitude more green than coal.[1] So feel free to invest in solar companies :-)

By the way, carbon neutrality is easier to achieve than 100% renewable. Google has been carbon neutral since 2007,[2] which means that they purchase carbon offsets for their carbon usage. Carbon offsets are cheaper than renewable energy credits because there is lower-hanging fruit. For example, agreeing not to clear-cut a forest for 20 years generates millions of tons of carbon credits.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse-gas_emis...

[2] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/carbon-neutrality-by...

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