Google Makes the Largest Ever Corporate Purchase of Renewable Energy (fastcompany.com) 56
Two years ago, Google became the first company of its size to buy as much renewable electricity as the electricity it used. But as the company grows, so does its demand for power. To stay ahead of that demand, Google just made the largest corporate renewable energy purchase in history, with 18 new energy deals around the world that will help build infrastructure worth more than $2 billion. From a report: The projects include massive new solar farms in places like Texas and North Carolina where the company has data centers. "Bringing incremental renewable energy to the grids where we consume energy is a critical component of pursuing 24x7 carbon-free energy for all of our operations," Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a blog post today. While most of the renewable energy the company has purchased in the past has come from wind farms, the dropping cost of solar power means that several of the new deals are solar plants. In Chile, a new project combines both wind and solar power, making it possible to generate clean energy for longer each day.
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Yeah, I'm marginally right wing but I don't really get their climate hate. Even if you are some nutter climate change denier lets just look at the bad health effects of pollution - wtf who wants to breathe that shit?
The left is loony too, but the right is loony and has this weird contrarian streak as you call out. They use "virtue signalling" as a phrase all the time, but that's half of what it means to be a far right winger these days - you have to guffaw with your buddies about sticking it to the libruhls
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Marginally right wing I can deal with. As long as you love freedom and democracy rather than authoritarianism, we're basically on the same side. But hey, did you know Sanders gets shit from the left for NOT being enough of a gun-grabber? https://www.vox.com/policy-and... [vox.com]
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Nobody minds better tech and climate technologies - we hate
a) having to pay through the nose for it
b) being told its all our fault (when you look at the east for the true culprits)
c) having the lefties use it as a stick to beat everyone else with because that's what they like doing, they don;t really care abotu climate change at all.
So we have the likes of Saint Greta telling us how terrible we are, while China and SE Asia pollute the planet like never before. We have climate activists shutting down airport
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Let me suggest that you google the following two topics:
1. Cumulative co2 by country (the USA leads, with CHina a long way behind).
2. CO2 emissions per capita by country (the USA is much higher on this table than China or anwhere in SE Asia).
Why do you feel entitled to be responsible for more CO2 emissions than someone in China?
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Why do you feel entitled to be responsible for more CO2 emissions than someone in China?
Because he is WASP?
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I don't - and you have the figures wrong, firstly the "per capita" is a bullshit response that says its OK to create more CO2 emissions because you have a lot of people. It isn't, the planet doesn't care. (and of those people I guarantee the rich middle classes use as much as you or I, averaged down by the huge rural population that use nothing)
The CO2 emissions of China far outweigh that of the USA. India is catching up fast while the USA and EU are dropping.
And then there's the other forms of pollution, d
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America is still the undisputed champion at pumping out CO2, with 25% of the worlds total.
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Typical, you can't read or comprehend. My point was total CO2 emissions to date. Go back through the 20th century and look at the total emissions to date. The USA leads this.
https://wriorg.s3.amazonaws.co... [amazonaws.com]
You feel entitled to be responsible for more CO2 emissions than a person living in China. Nothing totally selfish in that.
Then you go onto a lame attempt to change the topic.
loads of coal LOL (Score:1)
Care to find any 'good science' that agrees with you then?
Notice how quickly [ourworldindata.org] CO2 from coal rose.
How far back do you think you need to go? How many centuries of pre 1800's do you need to compare with the amount produced now? And do you really think China's technology millennia ago was a match for even the 1800's?
1800 was 30 million t of CO2 from coal.
100 years at that rate would be 3,000MT (3 GT) (actual pr
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You are an idiot, truly.
I feel entitled to be responsible for more CO2 emission than a person in China. You mean one of the politburo, right, or do you mean one of the rural poor who doesn't use any electricity?
You mean "on average", then you're still wrong, apart from this computer, maybe I live a simple, resource-limited life (I do as it happens) - as you try to change the subject from a statistic which you cannot defend (that China produces the most emissions) firstly to "oh but per capita its different"
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You come across as a typical entitled American with his head stuck up his arse.
Americans like you are the cause of the problem in the first place. [ourworldindata.org] Despite being a small country (5% of the world), you have put 25% of the extra CO2 into the atmosphere all by yourselves. Twice as much as China has, and eight times as much as India.
You are the one trying to give America a free pass. You are the one who thinks it's ok for an American to keep polluting at three times the world average and it's all other peoples
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Walk out (Score:1)
And now you see the brilliance of Tesla (Score:2)
As more and more of these large solar installations come online, Tesla is really going to be raking it in with battery support for installations to even out the ability to supply power 24x7.
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Re:And now you see the brilliance of Tesla (Score:4, Insightful)
I know you personally love to shit all over alternative energy projects (are you short selling alternative energy futures? Heavily invested in fracking?), but energy storage is not some unobtanium-based technology. It is here, now, and ready for prime time. Educate yourself, if only so you don't sound quite so foolish when you piss all over new technologies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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but energy storage is not some unobtanium-based technology. It is here, now, and ready for prime time.
If that were true, then these projects would be being built with storage instead of being backed by natural gas. It would be wonderful if we could build energy storage at the scale necessary to rely on wind and solar. But there's no reason to believe that's possible and plenty of reason to believe it isn't.
That isn't to say we shouldn't be building wind and solar. They're an acceptable part of an energy mix. But they can't be relied on for more than ~15% of our electricity of having a non-intermittent grid
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but energy storage is not some unobtanium-based technology. It is here, now, and ready for prime time.
If that were true, then these projects would be being built with storage instead of being backed by natural gas. It would be wonderful if we could build energy storage at the scale necessary to rely on wind and solar. But there's no reason to believe that's possible and plenty of reason to believe it isn't.
That isn't to say we shouldn't be building wind and solar. They're an acceptable part of an energy mix. But they can't be relied on for more than ~15% of our electricity of having a non-intermittent grid is a goal. We're nowhere near 15% renewables, so I'm not that worried.
Mod AC parent up...
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All the renewable energy subsidised by taxes Google Never ever pays. Ahh google stealing your social services to feed is insatiable greed and to pay for the PR agencies to make that steaming pile of shite look good. Ahh buying tax subsidised renewables when those cunts never paying taxes at the sources of income, oh no you silly fuckers can all just die from lack of emergency services, so google need not pay taxes ohh but look, tip toing through the tulips being oh so good using renewable energy. Virtue si
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The only one even remotely worth discussing on those lists is the compressed air storage - and that's going to be pretty rare to find. Batteries - which, if you weren't so hell-bent on insults and gotchas - were what the GP was discussing. They don't work. Unless your contention is that Tesla now makes compressed air storage systems?
It's called context, and apparently you don't get that. Learn basic reading comprehension, OK? Then you won't sound like a dolt who loves to put up strawmen and fail agains
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Compressed air storage is lossy, you wind up throwing away heat.
As batteries continue to improve it will make less and less sense to use anything else. And the more batteries we produce, the faster they will improve.
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Nope. Electrolyte must improve first, it's still a problem. I'm rooting for those glass lithium batteries. But luckily, we don't have to do it all at once. And we couldn't if we tried.
On the other hand, it no longer makes sense to put in anything but wind, solar, and storage. Because we CAN build renewables and even batteries quickly enough to meet new demand.
I hope we soon reach the point where it makes sense to rip out old plants and replace them with renewables, but i don't think we're there yet. The num
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No, we cannot make batteries fast enough to meet new demand. We can't even make batteries fast enough to take of small parts of old demand. That's the point - the biggest battery factory out there, can't even replace a single metropolitan area with a full year dedicated to just that - let alone new capacity coming on-line. Doesn't scale.
The Gigafactory could just barely cover LA, if all it did for an entire year was build batteries for LA. Then, because they are heavily used (every day, 100% discharge
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If people are actually willing to pay for the products, then the production capacity can be built. They have to pay ahead of time. That's what's happening here. It's this kind of purchasing that makes the whole thing possible. The wealthy seem to generally prefer to sit on cash in tax havens instead of investing it and take a chance on losing money they're not using anyway, but once it's a sure thing it's not hard to find investors. Money attracts money better than promises.
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You're right, but you are still wrong. That's a great list of energy storage project, but do note the capacities: They are all rated in MWH, and only a very few of them pass the 1000 mark. Most are in the single- and double-digits. The median size is well under 10MWh.
Google just bought 1.6GW of power generation capacity. A storage of 10MWh would store 22.5 seconds worth of that power. That's little more than a sneeze. The only current storage technology than offers capacities in the tens and hundreds of GWh
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What kind of insane energy mix would require enough storage to sustain overnight? Oh right, the 100% solar power Straw Man Electricity Co. one.
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Are you being serious? (Score:2)
You don't need to buy them fully charged and then slowly drain them over the course of an entire year worth of nights like you seem to be implying.
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Unless you really do think LA uses 35 GWh of electricity every night?
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And since those batteries would be completely used every day, they would last about 3 years (1000 full charges) before they are at 80% capacity
They degrade over time, about 3 years of use.
Serious but mistaken then. (Score:2)
Hardly. The Gigafactory can do about 35 GWh per year [electrek.co] in terms of production. Los Angeles County alone [ca.gov] used 67 GWh of electricity in 2018. We'd need a full year's of production of the Gigafactory alone to provide LA County with power overnight (half time).
It was implied here that 35GWh (1 years production). Would power half of LA's yearly use of 67GWh (33.5GWh). So they wouldn't need to be recharged. (Or recharged only once a year if you planned to use them again next year.) 1 years production would be greater than 1 years use.
You made a mistake with the use, and it should have actually been 1000 times more. So you are right, the batteries would need to be recharged regularly with those numbers. And they couldn't realistically make enough batteries to suppl
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Hardly. The Gigafactory can do about 35 GWh per year [electrek.co] in terms of production. Los Angeles County alone [ca.gov] used 67 GWh of electricity in 2018. We'd need a full year's of production of the Gigafactory alone to provide LA County with power overnight (half time).
Your math is way, way off.
67 GWh per year means 184 MWh per day (on average). Assuming 50% of that is at night (which is wrong; especially in LA a huge percentage of power goes to AC, which is used most heavily when the sun is shining, but never mind that), you need, on average, 92 MWh of storage. I'd guess you'd want to add some redundancy as well, in case of times of higher-than-normal usage or less-than-normal sunshine, so maybe add another 50%, so 138 MWh. But to make the batteries last decades you
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water power? (Score:2)
Wind, solar.. all very good but intermittent and unreliable, so Google will be relying on gas or nuclear for most of the time. But how about they invest in tidal power which is much more reliable for generation, new tech though so nobody else seems interested, but Google has money to burn
https://revolution-green.com/o... [revolution-green.com]
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Afaik all attempts at tidal and wave power generation have failed because of salt water. I'd be as pleased as you to see something that works, but the track record of previous attempts have been dismal and that's not for lack of trying, fanciful ideas or financing, it's just a really hard engineering problem.
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The Meygen project has been going for 6 years now, so i suppose they're developing the tech to deal with the problems. I understand the turbines are brought up every 6 years for an overhaul and maintenance. That's not too bad considering the lifetime for most wind turbines is 20 years.
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Wikipedia says that the four turbines weren't installed until feb 2017 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] I do hope it works out and hopefully we'll have data of maintenance costs in a few years .
Sadly the Tidal Power Scotland Limited who runs it is not publicly traded so there's little insight to the company but as it's sponsored by Scottish Enterprise that is publicly funded they might have to give out information.
Recycled Electrons ... (Score:2)
I don't know. My house is powered by 100% recycled electrons. Actually, I own all those electrons -- I just buy "pumping power" to make them move to and fro.
No, title is wrong, they can't purchase renewable (Score:1)
You can't buy renewable electricity energy, plain and simple! That's just not possible with how the power transmission & distribution grids work. Unless you get a direct cable from the plant to where you use it, all of this proclamation is a sham for the proletariat.
Power plants work to raise the potential difference between the power transmission grid and the ground. Many power plants are connected to the transmission grid. Point is, each of them has a role in the raising the potential difference of th
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Yes an electron is an electron, but they did "buy" renewable power, they're just not the ones guaranteed to consume it.
They spoke with and funded governments and businesses to build new renewable projects to offset their own data usage.
"But come to think of Alphabet and Scroogle one can expect such shenanigans" - yeah, they're not spotless, but this isn't shenanigans.
Does anybody care? (Score:3)
I'm pretty sure that nobody cares that Google is buying renewable energy, or that anyone else doing anything similar.
One reason not to care is that I keep reading about how wind and solar is cheaper than coal. That's a stretch but if true then buying wind and solar energy is just buying cheap energy. Making an announcement of buying the cheapest energy on the market is just good business, and not something that is noteworthy.
Another reason not to care is that this is so fashionable now that there are few companies that aren't making some announcement like this.
There's also quite a few that realize the impossibility of buying anything close to 100% renewable energy. They might be able to get in on the electricity market and buy and sell kilowatt-hours so that their money is going to some wind farm, solar power park, or whatever but that's just creative bookkeeping. They can only do this trading because there are plenty of power plants that burn coal and natural gas to allow for this trading.
Then there's the true believers that don't care. These are the people that will not be satisfied with Google until they meet all their demands on what they view as how a socially and environmentally conscious corporation should act. They will consider getting all their electricity from the wind, water, and sun a "good start". After that they will want to see all the utensils in the cafeteria be made from soy plastic, and be eaten by the Google employee at the end of their meal. The drinking glasses would have to be made from recycled glass and after use be cleaned by biodegradable detergents, and dried in the sun. All the food would have to be locally sourced vegan. I could go on. They cannot be pleased because they will simply find something else to complain about.
This is just a statement from Google, that costs them little in real money, but might get them some brownie points with the social justice warriors. Those people that do give a damn about this announcement will quite likely simply ask for more, because there will always be something else to complain about.
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The way it works around here is that companies write sustainability into their contracts now. When they open bidding for work they set requirements like "must be carbon neutral" or "must use at least 50% renewable energy".
Far enough up the chain there is either customer demand or regulation driving it.
So as well as saving Google money by buying cheap energy, it also helps them compete against the likes of Amazon and Microsoft on cloud infrastructure. Even if it's just a tick box to say "we bought renewable
The Wind Cometh (Score:1)