Google wants to do its part to protect the environment and it plans to use 100 percent renewable energy to power its international data centers next year.
Climate change and global warming are becoming increasingly worrisome problems and a number of corporations are coming up with solutions to ease the strain and be greener. Google is one of them, and it wants to fight global warming with renewable power.
Powering Data Centers On Renewable Energy
Like many technology companies of its size, Google has massive amounts of data to handle. To keep up, the company has 13 large warehouses and data centers worldwide, full of servers that host a wide range of data from YouTube videos to Gmail emails, Google Play Store content and more.
The servers need a lot of power to operate, as well as high-performance cooling systems that draw even more power. With this in mind, Google wants to operate its global data centers and offices on 100 percent renewable energy starting in 2017.
"To reach this goal we'll be directly buying enough wind and solar electricity annually to account for every unit of electricity our operations consume, globally," says Google. "And we're focusing on creating new energy from renewable sources, so we only buy from projects that are funded by our purchases."
Google will be buying more clean energy than it needs to counter the energy purchases it has to make in parts of the world where renewable energy is hard to come by. Simply put, Google will purchase more renewable energy and dump the excess back into the grid, The Verge points out.
To pull this off in the long term and rely on renewable energy for many years to come, Google also hopes to drive investment and development of green energy solutions in areas where it has major data centers and offices.
Renewable Energy Ambitions
Google has been making investments in clean energy for a while now, but is not the only one making notable headway with green power. As climate change is becoming an increasingly pressing matter, companies are trying to lessen the carbon footprint and provide cleaner energy solutions.
Tesla, for instance, recently announced that it can power an entire island on renewable energy. Apple is making its own efforts toward powering all of its operations with 100 percent renewable energy and it even created a subsidiary called Apple Energy LLC.
Efforts to protect the environment and help fight climate change go deeper than that, but operating on 100 percent renewable energy is a major milestone toward making the world a better place.
