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Google says it will run entirely on renewable energy in 2017
41–50 of 273 posts
Re: Google says it will run entirely on renewable energy in 2017
#42Unlike carbon-based power, Mr. Kava said, wind supply prices do not fluctuate, enabling Google to plan better. Can someone explain this? It seems like wind energy prices should fluctuate based on weather patterns (more wind == lower prices).
Theyre writing long term contracts for power production which provide a fixed price for the resource developers and by consequence provide them with a fixed cost. Typically, these types of contracts, providing price certainty, are required to build develop new renewable assets.
This. Price doesn't fluctuate for the purposes of this article because they've bought a minimum amount of electricity for a fixed price over time. (not because price of wind power never fluctuates)
Similar pegged pricing can be achieved if you trade futures to hedge your price but typically this is only achievable year to year and difficult to do with electricity as it can come from so many different sources and hedging against them all may be difficult. Perhaps there's a megawatt future out there?
EDIT: Yup - regionally-based electricity price hedge. Cool! http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/energy/#electricity
Re: Google says it will run entirely on renewable energy in 2017
#43Unlike carbon-based power, Mr. Kava said, wind supply prices do not fluctuate, enabling Google to plan better. Can someone explain this? It seems like wind energy prices should fluctuate based on weather patterns (more wind == lower prices).
Theyre writing long term contracts for power production which provide a fixed price for the resource developers and by consequence provide them with a fixed cost. Typically, these types of contracts, providing price certainty, are required to build develop new renewable assets.
This is the correct answer. Price hedging is a typical feature of corporate PPAs (power purchase agreements). The aim is to reduce risk for both parties. All the other answers here are speculating without knowing how corporate energy procurement works.
Re: Google says it will run entirely on renewable energy in 2017
#44For Google to say that it will run entirely on renewable energy is not accurate. Thank goodness only the headline of the article says that, but the article explains that Google gets electricity from the grid--which is not 100% renewable.
Perhaps a more accurate formulation would be "all of the money Google spends on electricity will go to renewable production".
Re: Google says it will run entirely on renewable energy in 2017
#45Google 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 more in energy costs than its capital cost over its lifetime.
So, whoever has the cheapest power will be able to provide cheapest services, or charge more for capacity located in more energy-expensive regions (for latency).
Re: Google says it will run entirely on renewable energy in 2017
#46For Google to say that it will run entirely on renewable energy is not accurate. Thank goodness only the headline of the article says that, but the article explains that Google gets electricity from the grid--which is not 100% renewable.
Electricity is fungible. Google is expecting to contribute back as much renewable energy as they are consuming from grid sources.
I would expect their usage to be higher if they were trying to store renewable power to maintain a base load, but that doesn't seem like enough to outright dispute the article/claim like this.
Re: Google says it will run entirely on renewable energy in 2017
#47Google 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…
Perhaps more importantly, because of the necessity for data centers to always be reliably online, this could help push for better grid-level energy storage solutions, the true Holy Grail of sustainable energy.
Renewables are effectively second-class citizens in the energy world until they can match the reliable storage capacity available from dead dinosaur.
Re: Google says it will run entirely on renewable energy in 2017
#48For Google to say that it will run entirely on renewable energy is not accurate. Thank goodness only the headline of the article says that, but the article explains that Google gets electricity from the grid--which is not 100% renewable.
It may not be "accurate" in a naive technical sense but it's not disingenuous. KWh are fungible and electrons don't care who uses their voltage potential for work as long as it goes somewhere. Every KWh that Google produces with solar is a KWh the fossil fuel power plants don't produce CO2 for, which is the entire point: a net zero impact on CO2 emissions for one of the largest pieces of computer infrastructure in the world.
Re: Google says it will run entirely on renewable energy in 2017
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You have to start somewhere. 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 o…
Lead poisoning in Kenya due to battery recycling and poor environmental regulations is my usual go-to:
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2014/08/kenya-lead-pois...
Re: Google says it will run entirely on renewable energy in 2017
#50So it's going to spend money to make it look like renewables make economic sense? My reading of it is that this is a PR move more than anything else.