Google Makes Major Investment In Renewable Energy To Power Internet Services

Google's renewable energy project, announced Thursday, adds 842 megawatts of renewable energy capacity to power its data centers, nearly doubling the amount of renewable energy purchased to date across three countries. 

The company wants to power all 14 of its data centers with renewable energy. Today, 37% of the energy for Google's data centers comes from renewable sources. It estimates the increase now totals up to 2 gigawatts, the equivalent to taking nearly 1 million cars off the road or powering roughly two million homes.

The power represents a range of locations and technologies, from a wind farm in Västernorrland County, Sweden, to 80 megawatts of solar plant in Chile. The contracts range from 10 year to 20 years and provide projects with the financial certainty and scale required to build wind and solar facilities. In a post, 

Urs Hölzle, SVP of technical infrastructure at Google, in a post explains how the project will help to minimize environmental impact of its services such as search and cloud storage.

Hölzle also points to separate agreements that fund $2.5 billion in 22 large-scale renewable energy projects during the last five years in Germany, Kenya, and Kansas, among other cities and countries. The investments have been made in some of the largest renewable energy projects worldwide with the goal of helping to drive renewable energy development not only as a customer but as an investor, and bring down costs for everyone.

Along with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and others have vowed to run on renewable energy. Apple has been investing in solar farms, Microsoft buying wind energy, and IBM and Salesforce bought their own energy for data centers or use green resources.  

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