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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

#4

Post by murph-almighty »

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/)

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

#6

Post by allenz »

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/

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

#7

Post by fulafel »

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/

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 difference here between GW (power) and energy - do they contract 3 GW 24/7 or are they buying 24*3 GWh per day whenever the spot prices are lowest, or are they paying companies to average 3 GW per day over a multi year contract? In the first scenario there will be surplus over 3GW for most of the day.

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

#9

Post by allenz »

fulafel wrote: post #7
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/

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/

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