Shifting to clean energy is increasingly being viewed as the common sense environmental and economic choice.
Corporations like Google epitomise the trend, with the tech giant announcing this week that the amount of renewable energy it purchased last year more than matched the electricity needed to run its global operations.
Urs Hölzle, Google’s Senior Vice President, Technical Infrastructure, blogged: “Over the course of 2017, across the globe, for every kilowatt hour of electricity we consumed, we purchased a kilowatt hour of renewable energy from a wind or solar farm that was built specifically for Google. This makes us the first public Cloud, and company of our size, to have achieved this feat.”
He continued: “We say that we “matched” our energy usage because it’s not yet possible to “power” a company of our scale by 100 percent renewable energy. It’s true that for every kilowatt-hour of energy we consume, we add a matching kilowatt-hour of renewable energy to a power grid somewhere. But that renewable energy may be produced in a different place, or at a different time, from where we’re running our data centers and offices. What’s important to us is that we are adding new clean energy sources to the electrical system, and that we’re buying that renewable energy in the same amount as what we’re consuming, globally and on an annual basis.”
