Google Commits to 24/7 Carbon Free Energy for all Operations By 2030

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Google has committed to becoming the first company in the world to operate on 24/7 carbon-free energy in all of its data centres and campuses worldwide.

Global tech giant Google has announced that it has committed to becoming the first company in the world to operate on 24/7 carbon-free energy in all of its data centres and campuses worldwide. A challenge it considers far greater than the traditional approach of matching energy usage with renewable energy, but it is working on getting it done by 2030. The firm is already the largest global corporate buyer of renewable energy, something it was doing to match its electricity consumption since 2016. Now, it is moving to make every hour of consumption powered by renewable energy.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and parent company Alphabet said “the science is clear: The world must act now if we’re going to avert the worst consequences of climate change.”

Further adding that the firm is committed to doing its part. “Sustainability has been a core value for us since Larry and Sergey founded Google two decades ago. We were the first major company to become carbon neutral in 2007. We were the first major company to match our energy use with 100 percent renewable energy in 2017. We operate the cleanest global cloud in the industry, and we’re the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy.

“In our third decade of climate action, we are going even further to help build a carbon-free future for everyone.”

The firm will also be investing in technologies to help its partners and people all over the world make sustainable choices. For example, the firm is investing in manufacturing regions to enable 5 GW of new carbon-free energy, helping 500 cities reduce their carbon emissions and finding new ways to empower 1 billion people through its products.

“We expect this to spur more than USD 5 billion in clean energy investments, avoid the amount of emissions equal to taking more than 1 million cars off the road each year, and create more than 8,000 clean energy jobs,” the firm stated.

The firm aims to help the 500 cities and local governments globally reduce a total of 1 gigaton of carbon emissions annually by 2030— the equivalent of the annual carbon emissions of a country the size of Japan.

In response to media reports earlier in the decade, Google had confirmed that each Google search consumed power that was equivalent to the release of about 0.2 grams of CO2 consuming 0.0003 kWh of energy. To put that into perspective, the search engine caters to roughly between 1 and 2 billion requests every day, this puts its net release just from searches at (equivalent to) 200 tons of CO2 per day or 450,000 kWh of energy consumed a day. The sheer scale of just one of its key operations i.e. Google Search puts into perspective the massive task that the company has committed to as it tries to meet the 24/7 demand for all its operations from carbon-free energy.

The firm has also announced that as of today, it has eliminated its entire carbon legacy (covering all our operational emissions before we became carbon neutral in 2007) through the purchase of high-quality carbon offsets. This means that Google’s lifetime net carbon footprint is now zero.