Google Goes Green: The Company Will Run Entirely on Wind & Solar Energy from 2017!

Google recently declared that all its data centres and offices spread across the world will be switching to clean and green power.

Last year, the company consumed as much energy as the entire city of San Francisco. To meet its huge energy needs, the company will now source energy from wind farms and solar panels from 2017.

Image for representation only. Source: Facebook

Operations of the eight different businesses run by the company take place from 13 huge data centres, which are home to millions of computers and over 60,000 employees.

According to a report by The Guardian, about 44% of the Google’s energy currently comes from renewable sources. The company is one of the world’s biggest corporate buyers of renewable power. Over the past decade, Google has been making a conscious effort towards transitioning to clean energy by making a number of large-scale deals with renewable energy producers. The company guarantees to buy the energy produced by these companies, which ensures bank finances to them for building more turbines or solar panels.

“We are convinced that 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 that climate change is a real, immediate threat, so we have to do our part,” Marc Oman, EU energy lead at Google told The Guardian.

As the production of the energy goes up, the costs come down significantly. Therefore, it is important to have large-scale consumers like Google on the map of renewable energy. According to a report by The New York Times, every time the production is doubled, the cost of solar energy is reduced by about 20 % and that of wind energy goes down 10 to 12 %.

Featured image source: by Shawn Collins, via Flickr

Also read: Elon Musk Is Not the Only One, This Indian Startup Creates Solar Rooftops – from Waste Materials!

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