Hawaiʻi's Technology Community
Google Wind Farms Converging with Server Farms and "Green Apps in the Google Cloud"
Go Google! The next step may be more directly connecting Google wind projects to their server farms and marketing "My e-mail is green -- is yours?" BTW, this story comes out the same day as the Civil Beat article on Big Wind in Hawaii.
David Leonard
Aluvion Energies Google to buy Iowa wind power and sell it to grid(07/20/2010)
Debra Kahn, E&E reporter
Google Inc. announced plans today to buy 114 megawatts of wind energy from an Iowa wind farm and sell it to the grid.
Under the 20-year contract, NextEra Energy Resources will begin deliveries July 30 from its Story II Wind Energy Center, then Google will sell the electricity to the regional spot market in hopes of stimulating demand for renewable energy, company executives said.
The deal is the first for Google Energy LLC, an entity formed by the technology giant in December 2009 with the stated intent of greening the company's operations. The license that Google obtained from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission also allows it to sell electricity in regulated markets (E&ENews PM, Feb. 18).
Google is also buying the renewable energy credits (RECs) associated with the electricity. It will use the RECs to offset its own carbon emissions, before selling the energy back into the grid. Google did not disclose the terms of the power purchase agreement.
"We have not previously purchased RECs because when disassociated from their source, we feel the environmental benefits are diluted," Google spokesman Jamie Yood said. "So instead of just buying 'naked' RECs, we're buying the green power directly, with a long-term commitment that helps free up capital for the developer to build more wind projects."
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Comment by Brian on July 24, 2010 at 3:11am
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If you take a list of countries' per-capita oil consumption then you basically end up with wealthy countries on top and poor ones on the bottom. It's completely unremarkable.
If you want to establish standards, it has to be on a per-person basis - that's the only truly fair way after all. So talking about what "country" uses the most oil only matters to the extent that people in a certain country will be influenced by the policies set there.
Besides, COP-15 demonstrated that mandated standards won't work without the support of the US and China. The EU emissions market has only really shown how little clout they have. Having that demonstrated clearly was perhaps the only success of COP-15.
What else was achieved there? Nothing. No, the real lesson we saw there was how the behaviour of people has not changed. Remember, this was a CLIMATE CHANGE conference where they invited 45,000 people to a 15,000 person convention center and then they had to import hundreds of limousines from throughout Europe to meet the "needs" of the guests.
And that's the true problem - whenever we're confronted with an energy crisis.. or a water crisis.. we look at how to make more resource to feed our growing demand - rather than looking at our consumption pattern and working towards remapping our real-world processes to align with the values we're espousing.
Until that happens, this is all a complete waste of time (And is only making things worse by generating more emissions and using more energy!)
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Comment by Mika Leuck on July 22, 2010 at 5:54pm
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Nice! This is great to see.
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You mean Google hasn't figured out a way to crowd-source power yet?
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