Tag Archives: Energy + Environment

Climate change affects the things we love #OursToLose

Cross-posted from the YouTube blog

From seasons to octopuses and chocolate, environmental issues stand to impact the things we love. What if we could help change the way people discuss climate change, so that the issue and its consequences could become more relevant and tangible to people around the world?

Leading up to COP21, a conference which will bring leaders from around the world together to develop a global climate agreement, we’re encouraging the YouTube community to join the discussion by uploading their own videos that share their concerns about how environmental issues may impact the things they love. The conversation on YouTube will live through a simple hashtag: #OursToLose.



With the help of YouTube creators from around the world, including Casey Neistat (U.S.), https://www.youtube.com/user/JacksGap
(U.K.), Golden Moustache (France), Jamie Curry (New Zealand) and Flavia Calina (Brazil), we’re also encouraging people to show further support by signing the Avaaz petition, a campaign aimed at delivering clean energy worldwide by 2050.

Whether you’re questioning how global warming can impact your day-to-day life, curious about new sources of energy, or concerned about the melting Arctic, we hope that you share your ideas through #OursToLose videos to help make the climate conversation more accessible to people around the world.



The YouTube community can empower tremendous collaboration, advocacy, and creativity. Through #OursToLose, we hope to continue helping people to broadcast their message, empower their communities, and even catalyze a global movement to further action on climate change.

Posted by Marc Hertz, Programming Coordinator, and Aaron Taylor, Associate Product Marketing Manager, YouTube. Videos they watched recently include “Misconceptions about Climate Change” recently watched “What’s Possible: The UN Climate Summit Film.”

Little Box Challenge Academic Awards

Many of the world’s most innovative products have started in universities and academic institutions around the world. In fact, in 1996 Google founders Larry and Sergey began collaborating on an early search engine, which operated on Stanford servers for more than a year—eventually taking up too much bandwidth. So it only made sense to encourage academic researchers to try their skills at the Little Box Challenge to see if they could invent a smaller power inverter and help change the future of electricity.

We received over 100 applications from academic institutions for our Little Box Challenge grants and just announced the 10 recipients. Head on over to the Research at Google blog for the list, but then get back to work on shrinking those inverters!

Posted by Eric Raymond, Google Green Team

Dutch windmills to power Google’s Eemshaven data center

(Cross-posted from the Google Europe Blog)

The Netherlands is famous for its windmills, which over the years have been used to saw wood, mill corn, pump water and much more. Now, a new generation of Dutch windmill - wind turbines - will power a very 21st century facility: our new EUR 600m data center, currently under construction in the north of the Netherlands.

Thanks to a new long-term agreement signed this week with Dutch power company Eneco, our Eemshaven data center will be 100% powered by renewable energy from its first day of operation, scheduled for the first half of 2016. We’ve agreed to buy the entire output of a new Eneco windfarm -- currently under construction at Delfzijl, near Eemshaven -- for the next ten years.

By entering into long-term agreements like this one with wind farm developers, we’ve been able to increase the amount of renewable energy we consume while helping enable the construction of new renewable energy facilities.

This is the third such power purchase agreement (PPA) we’ve signed in Europe in the last 18 months - the other two were with wind farm developers in Sweden and will power our Hamina, Finland data center with renewable energy.

Eneco’s new wind farm is an onshore-offshore development, which will use 19 turbines to generate 62 MW of renewable energy. Eneco expects the construction of the wind farm to provide employment for 80 people over the next 18 months.

This marks our eighth long-term agreement to purchase renewable energy around the globe. We sign these contracts for a few reasons: they make great financial sense for us by guaranteeing a long term source of clean energy for our data center and they also increase the amount of renewable energy available in the grid, which is great for the environment.

Posted by Francois Sterin, Director, Global Infrastructure Team

Dutch windmills to power Google’s Eemshaven data centre

The Netherlands is famous for its windmills, which over the years have been used to saw wood, mill corn, pump water and much more. Now, a new generation of Dutch windmill - wind turbines - will power a very 21st century facility: our new EUR 600m data centre, currently under construction in the north of the Netherlands.

Thanks to a new long-term agreement signed this week with Dutch power company Eneco, our Eemshaven datacenter will be 100% powered by renewable energy from its first day of operation, scheduled for the first half of 2016. We’ve agreed to buy the entire output of a new Eneco windfarm -- currently under construction at Delfzijl, near Eemshaven -- for the next ten years.

By entering into long-term agreements like this one with wind farm developers, we’ve been able to increase the amount of renewable energy we consume while helping enable the construction of new renewable energy facilities.

This is the third such power purchase agreement (PPA) we’ve signed in Europe in the last 18 months - the other two were with wind farm developers in Sweden and will power our Hamina, Finland datacenter with renewable energy.

Eneco’s new windfarm is an onshore-offshore development, which will use 18 turbines to generate 62 MW of renewable energy. Eneco expects the construction of the windfarm to provide employment for 80 people over the next 18 months.



This marks our eighth long-term agreement to purchase renewable energy around the globe. We sign these contracts for a few reasons: they make great financial sense for us by guaranteeing a long term source of clean energy for our data center and they also increase the amount of renewable energy available in the grid, which is great for the environment.

Posted by Francois Sterin, Director, Global Infrastructure Team

Africa’s Largest Solar Plant Comes Online

In May 2013, we announced our first renewable energy investment in Africa. The Jasper Power Project is a 96-megawatt (MW) solar photovoltaic (PV) plant in the Northern Cape province of South Africa, near Postmasburg. There is a lot of potential for solar in a country where the sun shines year round. From virtually no renewable energy in 2011, South Africa has awarded close to 4 gigawatts (GW) in wind and solar contracts to become one of the fastest growing renewable energy markets in the world.

Today, we’re happy to contribute to that momentum. The Jasper Project has completed construction and is capturing sunlight nearly two months ahead of schedule. In fact, with 325,000 PV modules, it is the largest solar energy plant in Africa. The project, developed and funded by SolarReserve, Intikon Energy and the Kensani Group, is also backed by Rand Merchant Bank, the Public Investment Corporation, Development Bank of South Africa and the PEACE Humansrus Trust.
Jasper Power Project PV panels
During construction, the Jasper Project created over 800 on-site construction jobs. As part of the South African Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Program (REIPPPP), the project will also set aside a percentage of total revenues—approximately $26 million over the life of the project, for rural development and education programs.

The Jasper Project will deliver 180,000 megawatt-hours of renewable electricity annually for South Africa residents – enough to power up to 80,000 households. It’s promising to see South Africa continue to take advantage of its abundant wind and solar resources to bring more clean energy to the country’s power grid. The government has set an ambitious goal of generating 18 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy by 2030 and the Jasper Project is an important step into addressing the power shortages afflicting the country.

Posted by Coy Ross, Google energy asset manager

Google’s commitment to sustainability

At Google, we've worked hard to minimize the impact of our services and we stand strongly behind our goal to create a better web that's better for the environment. Recently Eric Schmidt responded to some misguided criticisms from the Wall Street Journal with this letter.

Google has a long-standing and very real commitment to sustainability. 
Your editorial "Google Kills Birds" (Sept. 26) uses comments I made during a National Public Radio interview to accuse Google of hypocrisy on climate change. My words could have been more artful, as Google recently had a thoughtful and constructive meeting about renewable energy and climate change with the American Legislative Exchange Council. However, the Journal wrongly questions Google's long-standing and very real commitment to sustainability.
Our data centers, which enable products and services for billions of users around the world, use renewable energy whenever possible. And, since 2007 (like the company that owns this newspaper) we have been carbon neutral. We invest in renewable energy projects and purchase wind power for our operations, across states like Oklahoma and North Dakota, neither of which have renewable mandates. We have committed $1.5 billion around the world to help bring more renewable energy sources onto the grid, investments that have the capacity to generate 2.5 GW—far more energy than we consume as a company. 
Much of corporate America is buying renewable energy in some form or another, not just to be sustainable, but because it makes business sense, helping companies diversify their power supply, hedge against fuel risks, and support innovation in an increasingly cost-competitive way. 
The Wall Street Journal refers to our "trendy appeals to green virtue." Environmental consciousness is not trendy. It's an absolute imperative. And we're committed to doing our part to build the better world that this moment demands—and that future generations deserve.
Eric Schmidt
Executive Chairman
Google Inc.
Mountain View, Calif.

We'll continue our efforts to drive ourselves and our industry to be more sustainable and you can continue to follow our progress on this blog and at our Google green site.

Posted by Michael Terrell, Energy & Sustainability team member