Google ups ante, nearly doubles bet on renewable energy

And now Google, the company that has in many ways been the leader of corporate clean energy purchasing, has announced its biggest new move yet.

The commitments over the long term announced on Thursday cover as much as 842 megawatts of power, which will flow from six different solar and wind power projects that are scheduled to be complete within two years in Sweden, Chile and the U.S.

Search engine and information tech giant Google has purchased the output of renewable energy generation facilities totalling 841MW across several global territories.

Google has committed to power its operations from 100% renewable energy. “These long-term contracts range from 10-20 years and provide projects with the financial certainty and scale necessary to build these wind and solar facilities – thus bringing new renewable energy onto the grid in these regions”, he wrote.

“We’ll be building a data center campus on the same site, taking advantage of the infrastructure that was built over decades to deliver energy to the area”, said Gary Demasi, Google’s director of data center energy and location, in an interview with Wired. The company is hoping to have 3.6 gigawatts of energy lined up by that time.

The now contracted 2 gigawatts is sufficient to supply more than 2 million homes in Europe annually, based upon estimates by Google of an average of 7.4 billion kilowatt hours of electrical power. “For our part, these contracts not only help minimize the environmental impact of our services-they also make good business sense by ensuring good prices”.

Google, which is part of the recently launched company Alphabet Inc, is still far away from reaching that goal.

Apple, Facebook and other technology companies also have been investing heavily in renewable energy in an effort to reduce the pollution caused by the popularity of their products.

“Beyond our efforts to power our own operations with renewables, we’ve made separate agreements to fund $2.5 billion into 22 large-scale renewable energy projects over the last five years, from Germany to Kansas to Kenya”, Google added in today’s announcement. The Cairo Solar alliance, which includes the Engineering Consultants Group (ECG), and AMC, among 136 Egyptian and worldwide companies, qualified to implement the new and renewable energy projects, in accordance with the feed-in tariff system approved by the cabinet, out of 187 offers presented.