Google Bought Enough Wind Power To Match 100 Percent Of Its Energy Use From 2017 [View all]

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Update | Google is going green—green enough to offset its entire nonrenewable energy consumption.

The company announced Thursday that it had purchased enough wind and solar energy to match 100 percent of the energy required to run its products in 2017. The clean energy purchases brought the company’s total wind and solar capacity to over three gigawatts.

“With solar and wind declining dramatically in cost and propelling significant employment growth, the transition to clean energy is driving unprecedented economic opportunity and doing so faster than we ever anticipated,” Gary Demasi, Google’s director of global infrastructure, said in a statement.

Google signed three contracts to reach its 2017 goal. The company purchased 140 megawatts from the Grand River Dam Authority’s Oklahoma wind farm; 200 megawatts from EDF Renewable Energy’s Iowa wind farm; and 196 megawatts from Avangrid Renewables’ two South Dakota wind farms.

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In the last six years, wind energy costs dropped by 60 percent and solar by 80 percent, according to a statement from Urs Hölzle, Google’s senior vice president of technical infrastructure, last year.


More: http://www.newsweek.com/google-will-be-powered-only-wind-and-solar-citing-massive-savings-728745



Wind-turbine generators in Desert Hot Springs, California, in 2011.
REUTERS