Google says it will run entirely on renewable energy in 2017 • Hacker News Board

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

#271

Post by majewsky » Thu, Dec 08, 2016, 10:35 AM UTC

douche wrote: post #270

CptJamesCook wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 747 in the air consumes more power than every single home in San Francisco. "A Boeing 747 jet has an average power consumption of 140 megawatts." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(power) You can use this link to see San Francisco's power usage in 2015: http://ecdms.energy.ca.gov/elecbycounty.aspx It was almost exactly 140 megawatts/hour * 24 hours * 365 days. I highly doubt Google's worldwide data…

Holy shit, is that really what a 747 draws? That is nuts. I worked for a few summers at a powerplant that put out about 40-50 MW/h, burning wood biomass.

As a physicist, I'm always surprised how people generally get units right [1], but they shoot themselves in the foot multiple times over when trying to measure power and energy.

MW/h doesn't make any sense. A unit of power would be MW, a unit of energy would be MWh (megawatt times hour, not divided by hour). MW/h would be a power increase over time, which is surely not what the parent means.

[1] Unless they're in the US, Liberia or Myanmar. :)

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

#272

Post by crpatino » Thu, Dec 08, 2016, 6:40 PM UTC

axman6 wrote: post #267

crpatino wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is less ridiculous than you make it out to be. Nobody forces you to buy a cow to put milk on your cofee, but if you go around offering "organic capuccinos" for sale, your customers could normally expect you to either milk the grass fed cow yourself or, more likely, purchase your milk from a certified provider that does so. They certainly don't expect you to claim that since you make a donation to some Amish charit…

This is just utter nonsense and shows a complete lack of how the electricity grid operates.

Does it? I rather think that your criticism shows a complete lack of awareness of how the the public opinion operates.

Let's say for the sake of the argument that Google's datacenters consume 1% of the electricity in the US.

If Google were operating its datacenters with clean/renewable electricity produced on site, it means the technical problems are, for all practical purposes, already solved; and now everybody can just license their technology an imitate them. There still remains the economic and political problem of having the other 9x% of the country to jump on board, and invest the required resources to convert to renewables, but that's simply a matter of how much money is devoted to that. It could take us 100, or 50, or 20 years, but we'd know for certain that we will eventually get there.

Instead, we have Google claim to be operating their datacenters with clean energy, but instead they operate with whatever mix of clean&dirty energy is available from the local provider, and then go elsewhere and finance the production (let's say, same amount of kilowatts/hr) of renewable energy. That is still a good thing, since those investments would never had been done without the incentive, but there are 2 problems with that.

1. You call electricity "fungible", but it is not. You cannot generate the same amount of solar kWh per dollar in Alaska than in Arizona, the same way you cannot generate the same amount of hidro kWh/$ in Arizona than in Mississipi. By following economic rules, it is rational to assume that Google is picking the low hanging fruit first. Therefore, when the other companies try to emulate, they will find that the second 1% will be more expensive than the first, the third than the second, and so on...

2. The other big whale in the room is that renewable electricity, unlike coal-based, cannot be produced on demand. Until the problem with storage is solved, - and for what I have heard from people that has been doing this for many years it is far from solved, - you will need some form of fosil fuel to close the gaps when production is low. It is very easy to add 1% renewables to the general "fungible" pool of electricity in the grid, but 5% would be less so and I don't think it would be possible at all to do 50% with current technology, even if the production capacity was already in place.

So, what do you think? are my concerns really nonsense, or ridiculous?

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

#273

Post by cestith » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 4:50 PM UTC

paul_f wrote: post #209

cestith wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Houston, the "Oil and Gas Capital of the World", I buy 100% wind power from Green Mountain. They're not the only game in town for 100% renewables, either. Green Mountain themselves do have mixed plans, but mine's 100% wind. It's not the cheapest power in town (some retail electric providers go below $0.04 per kWh for the first year of your contract or such if you don't care) but with Texas by law having a competit…

I have a hard time believing this. What does Green Mountain use when the wind dies? Do they have a grid storage solution?

As problems stated, there's probably a bit of arbitrage going on behind the scenes. However, Texas also has a well connected grid across the rather large state that is only weakly connected to other grids. There's a lot of wind in Texas and a lot of wind power. On an average day 12% of the entire state is powered by wind. Some days it's 40%. Sometimes wind produces so much energy that the spot price goes negative and wind farms are paid to disconnect so they don't overrun the transmission system.