Wind Energy Planning

Google has denied rumours that it is set to become and energy trader at a GreenNet conference in San Francisco last week.

With hundreds of millions of customers, Google uses mammoth computer infrastructure to keep everything going. However Google’s carbon reduction intentions have been well publicised over the last year. From biofuel diesel shuttle buses to take staff to its HQ offices to ‘edible gardens’ where food for its onsite cafes is grown, Google is keen on green corporate social responsibility.

Google announced a number of years ago a commitment to become carbon neutral. Firstly the company set out to improve the energy efficiency of its operations. Secondly it started looking towards alternatives to conventional energy sources with ambitions to run data centers using renewable energy. In order to achieve this ambitious carbon neutral target, the company is now investing in R&D to make renewable energy cheaper mainly under its in-house project RE<C.

Thirdly Google is to invest in projects to offset the harmful emissions from the inevitable remaining non- renewable energy generation.

The Google renewable energy initiative RE<C aims to produce 1 GW of renewable energy cheaper than the price of coal.  The project is focussed primarily on solar thermal, wind energy and enhanced geothermal.  The company already has 1.6 megawatts (MW) solar power installed at its Mountain View, CA data center which provides 30% of peak energy requirements.

However in its latest move Google has gone way beyond R&D and installation at its own sites.  In February this year, the company applied and received approval from the US government to buy and sell energy on the wholesale electricity market. The news clearly led people to believe Google wanted to be an energy player.

Despite its new FERC status Google’s Bill Weihl denied that Google is set to become an energy trader… “Suppose a developer wants to build a wind farm down the road, we’d love to buy power from that wind farm. But to do so in a way that helps that developer, we would need to sign a power purchase agreement for, say, 10 or 20 years, to allow him to get good financing rates and free up capital for his next project,” he said.

If Google is still locked in a contract with its existing utility company, it would be “throwing money away” to sign an overlapping contract with the wind farm.

“What the FERC authority allows us to do is turn around and resell that power until the day comes when we can use it ourselves,” Weihl said. “That’s fundamentally the type of thing we want to do.”