Google Says It Will Run Entirely on Renewable Energy in 2017
“We are the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy in the world,”
.. Unlike carbon-based power, Mr. Kava said, wind supply prices do not fluctuate, enabling Google to plan better.
.. YouTube and Gmail, each of which has over 1 billion customers. They run on a global network of 13 large-scale data centers, each one a complex of many buildings containing hundreds of thousands of computers.
.. The 5.7 terawatt-hours of electricity Google consumed in 2015 “is equal to the output of two 500 megawatt coal plants,”
.. That is enough for two 140,000-person towns.
.. “Every time you double production, you reduce the cost of solar by about 20 percent. Wind goes down 10 to 12 percent,”
.. Critics note that while Google might be adding wind and solar to the world’s power grid, overall it is still dependent on fossil fuels, since sun and wind power are intermittent, while demand for things like YouTube cat videos is continual.
“In my mind it’s a P.R. gimmick,” said Chris Warren, vice president of communications at the Institute for Energy Research, a think tank in Washington supported largely by donations from individuals and companies in the fossil fuel industry.