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I was simply shocked to read that Google as a whole consumes as much as a whole metropolis. The fact that they're going green, is awesome on their part..!
"I was simply shocked to read that Google as a whole consumes as much as a whole metropolis." Considering that they employ ~70k people, plus the hardware to run their business, that sounds about right.
This is more than a nitpicking point. The reason why renewable energy isn't a totally viable energy source is because of problems with reliability, predictability, geographic concentration of production, etc. It is highly misleading to give people the impression that an operation like Google can actually operate directly off exclusively renewable energy.
What Google is doing will eventually hit a cap and become zero sum. You still need fossil fuels (or nuclear) to support a reliable and dispersed grid, and can therefore only have a a certain percent of the grid powered by renewables. So if you want your company to "run entirely on renewable energy", you'll end up in a bidding war with other companies that want the same thing, to be the technical purchaser (not consumer!) of the renewable energy going into the grid.
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The hardware for green energy production included, like solar panels... Since they don't last for ever and need lots of energy to be produced, I wonder how long it takes to just get even.
For Solar it obviously depends on a lot of factors (where you put them, which technology, where it is produced), but it's in the range of 0-4 years, depending on which study you look at. Common lifetime is ~20-30 years. See e.g. https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/de/downloads/pdf-files/aktuell... http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35489.pdf http://www.volker-quaschning.de/datserv/kev/index.php
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Once you spend the capital on wind turbine hardware and infrastructure, the price of your energy generation is fairly constant. Price on energy supply from fossil fuels always depends on the fluctuating price of those fuels, which introduces uncertainties to future costs of energy.
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).
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.
The hardware for green energy production included, like solar panels... Since they don't last for ever and need lots of energy to be produced, I wonder how long it takes to just get even.
I was simply shocked to read that Google as a whole consumes as much as a whole metropolis. The fact that they're going green, is awesome on their part..!
I'd expect much more than that given the size of their operations. i.e. just running the entire world.
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.
You have to start somewhere. Moving manufacturing and infrastructure from "dirty" to "green" is a transition process. It's infeasible to modify the entire supply chain to be non-renewable in one shot. The entire world's economy is incredibly intertwined. The entire manufacturing stack won't be purely renewable until the entire world is running on renewable energy.
I wonder to what extent Google can shift calculations around in time to take advantage of fluctuations in power generation. Serving cat videos might be something you do all the time but indexing the web and training Go AIs doesn't have to be a continuous process.
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.
You have to start somewhere. Moving manufacturing and infrastructure from "dirty" to "green" is a transition process. It's infeasible to modify the entire supply chain to be non-renewable in one shot. The entire world's economy is incredibly intertwined. The entire manufacturing stack won't be purely renewable until the entire world is running on renewable energy.
In today's world, you have to make an effort to not fart with a bad carbon footprint. Most of your personal emissions will be ingested air. (Not methane, as most think.) However, the fertilizers and pesticides in the food you ate to make you fart, plus the heat to cook the food, and the industrial input it took to make the cooking implements and the kitchen the food was cooked in -- all of these have a carbon footprint.
It's precisely as you say. We are in transition. It's naive to point out that anything "green" still has a carbon footprint. I need to find a definitive article that makes the case for this idea so I can link to it every time I see the naive argument.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The hardware for green energy production included, like solar panels... Since they don't last for ever and need lots of energy to be produced, I wonder how long it takes to just get even.
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.