Google CEO Sundar Pichai noted the company's existing goal of operating entirely carbon-free by 2030 rather than offsetting its carbon footprint. "Within a decade we aim for every Google data center, cloud region, and office campus to run on clean electricity every hour of every day," writes Pichai. According to Pichair, five data center sites in Denmark, Finland, Iowa, Oklahoma and Oregon are now operating "near or at 90% carbon-free energy".
Four consecutive years of 100% renewable energy
Google also announced that in 2020 they matched 100 percent of its global electricity use with purchases of renewable energy. Urs Hölzle, SVP Cloud Infrastructure: "We were the first company of our size to achieve this milestone back in 2017, and we’ve repeated the accomplishment in every year since. All told, we’ve signed agreements to buy power from more than 50 renewable energy projects, with a combined capacity of 5.5 gigawatts – about the same as a million solar rooftops".
Hölzle: "The path to 100% starts with reducing the amount of energy we use in the first place. Researchers recently found that worldwide data center electricity stayed close to flat in the last decade, even as computing needs grew 550 percent. And Google has led this trend: compared with five years ago, we now deliver around seven times as much computing power with the same amount of electrical power. Last year’s accomplishment was also due to a global package of renewable energy deals that we announced in late 2019. As those projects came online over the course of 2020, hundreds of new turbines and hundreds of thousands of new solar panels began converting wind and sun into electrons".
Google has so far locked in around $4 billion to buy clean energy from more than 50 wind and solar projects globally until 2034. by 2030, Google aims to run on entirely 24/7 carbon-free energy, everywhere they operate.
