Google has been making major strides in becoming a sustainable company over the past few years, with little fanfare and publicity. Few may be aware that the internet giant, which consumed as much energy as the city of San Francisco last year, is currently the largest corporate consumer of renewable energy in the world. Today, Google announced that next year, all of its energy would come from renewable sources. All of its data centers and offices, which support 60,000 staff, will run completely on solar or wind energy.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean that Google will literally only consume renewable energy in the coming years. Like most other companies, it gets its power from an energy grid that draws on a combination of renewable and nonrenewable sources. But what it will do is fund the production of enough renewable energy to offset all of its consumption, meaning that it will create no net usage of fossil fuels.
Google has been inking large deals with wind and solar power companies, guaranteeing that it will purchase energy from them, so that they can in turn get the bank loans to construct wind and solar farms, The New York Times reports. Environmental benefits and positive publicity aside, Google is arguing that its move to become powered 100% by renewable energy sources is also good business.
Technological advances and growing demand have driven the cost of renewables down dramatically to the extent that in some countries, they are even cheaper than fossil fuels. Their prices are also much more stable than those of nonrenewable energy sources like coal, making costs more predictable.
“We are convinced 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,” said Marc Oman, EU energy lead at Google, according to The Guardian. “Our founders are convinced climate change is a real, immediate threat, so we have to do our part.”
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