Google to be powered by 100% renewables from 2017

Internet and tech giant Google has announced that all its data centres and offices will be powered fully by renewable energy from next year.

Google is the first corporate buyer of renewable electricity in the world with 44 per cent of its electricity bought from solar and wind plants in 2015.

The company has now committed to buying 100 per cent of its electricity from renewable sources from next year onwards.

The 100 per cent renewables target does not mean that Google will obtain all its energy directly from wind and solar but rather that every year, the total purchases from renewables equals the electricity needed for its operations.

Marc Oman, EU Energy Lead at Google, said: “We are convinced this is good for business, this is not about greenwashing. This is about locking in prices for us in the long term. Increasingly, renewable energy is the lowest cost option... Our founders are convinced climate change is a real, immediate threat, so we have to do our part.”

Tech companies currently represent 2 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, which is almost as high as the aviation industry’s emissions.

The company offices host 60,000 staff, and the data centres require an increasing amount of power, despite the improved energy efficiency brought by the use of AI.

With a growing concern about climate change and global warming, tech companies have come under increasing pressure to reduce their carbon footprints.

Google originally set its target of being powered by 100 per cent renewable energy in 2012, and it took them five years to achieve this goal – due to the complexity of power purchase agreements negotiations, according to Oman.

 He said: “It’s complicated, it’s not for everyone: smaller companies will struggle with the documents. We are buying power in a lot of different jurisdictions, so you can’t just copy and paste agreements.”

The internet giant bought 5.7 TWh of renewable electricity last year – mostly from wind farms in the US, the equivalent of more than two thirds of the whole of electricity generated by solar panels in the UK in 2015.

Google is also looking at nuclear, hydro and biomass.

Oman said: “We want to do contracts with forms of renewable power that are more baseload-like, so low-impact hydro; it could be biomass if the fuel source is sustainable, it could be nuclear, God forbid, we’re not averse. We’re looking at all forms of low-carbon generation.”

He added: “We don’t want to rule out signing a nuclear contract if it meets our goals of low price, safety, additionality and in a sufficiently close grid, we don’t want to rule that out, but today we can’t positively say there are nuclear projects out there that meet this criteria.”