Since its founding in 1998, Google has become much more than a basic online search engine. It has become a worldwide brand, Google Inc. The company boasts a variety of products and services, dealing with and extending beyond the Internet. Examples of their products include Gmail, Google Earth, and the Android line of smartphones. Along with their impressive list of convenient web services and fun gadgets, Google has also recently invested in an experimental highspeed internet project, Google Fiber. According to Rick Needham, the Green Business Operations Manager of the company, Google Fiber will provide an internet connection to one lucky community in the U.S. (ranging from 50,000 to 500,000 individual homes and businesses) at an astounding speed of one gigabit per second, roughly 100 times faster than the average Internet connection most Americans have access to. Madison is one of the lucky cities being considered for the project.
As one of the most rapidly growing businesses in the world, Google needs a tremendous amount of energy to power their various enterprises. On April 30, Google Inc. purchased two wind farms in the plains of North Dakota. According to Google’s official blog, the company calls this significant investment their “first direct investment in a utility-scale renewable energy project.”
According to the website Alternative Energy News, Google’s $38.8 million dollar investment in these two windfarms will yield 169.5 megawatts of energy, which can power up to 55,000 homes (which is also the minimum target group for Google Fiber). Google claims that “the turbines can continuously adjust the individual blade pitch angles to achieve optimal efficiency and use larger blades with 15 percent more swept area than earlier generations, allowing capture of even more wind energy for each turbine.” In addition to the high caliber output of energy, the state of the art technology these turbines run on provides a record low-cost sources of renewable energy.
Through Google.org, the philanthropic branch of the company, the company has announced that they plan on pushing for further reliance on renewable energy for future large-scale projects. Alternative Energy News reports that Google Inc. has indicated to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, that it will help buy and sell electricity on the wholesale market. Needham confirms Google Inc.’s intentions to invest further in clean energy by stating: “Smart capital includes not only these early-stage company investments, but also dedicated funding for utility-scale projects. To tackle this need, we’ve been looking at investments in renewable energy projects, like the one we just signed, that can accelerate the deployment of the latest clean energy technology while providing attractive returns to Google and more capital for developers to build additional projects.” Google has already followed through on this promise by investing in companies, such as BrightSource Energy and eSource, that focus on developing clean energy technologies.
Google is not only a pioneer of Internet related technologies–the company acts as a strong example for other large companies to follow in the journey towards reliance on clean energy.
