In 2017, Google met its goal of matching all of its global electricity use with 100% renewable energy.
As planned, the company purchased a kilowatt-hour of wind or solar for every kilowatt-hour of power it consumed, according to a blog from Urs Hölzle, Google’s senior vice president for technical infrastructure, who notes that the wind and solar projects were built specifically for the company.
“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,” Hölzle explains. “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.”
The blog notes that Google currently has contracts to buy 3 GW of renewable energy – representing more than any other corporate renewables purchaser. The company plans to build more data centers and offices globally and thus expects to keep signing more renewable energy contracts.
