14 DAY TRIAL // Google has been very active with its green initiatives in the past few weeks, putting its money where its mouth is, so to speak. It invested in several large scale clean energy projects and has now agreed to buy all of the energy provided by a wind farm in Oklahoma for the next 20 years, a deal similar to one signed last year.
"Our commitment to greening our energy supply is also strong, which is why we’ve just signed a power purchase agreement (PPA) for wind energy—our second in less than a year—in Oklahoma," Gary Demasi, from Google's Global Infrastructure team, announced.
"The purchase is similar in size and structure to the agreement we signed last July for wind energy in Iowa, but this time we will be applying the power to our Mayes County, Okla. data center, which will be fully operational later this year," he explained.
"We’ve agreed to purchase all of the energy from NextEra Energy Resources’ Minco II wind facility in Oklahoma for the next 20 years," he added.
The wind farm isn't even built yet and the money Google has promised to provide helped the project get the funds needed for its completion. Minco II should be working by the end of the year.
Google is doing quite a bit of maneuvering to be able to buy as much green energy as possible in order to reduce its carbon footprint.
When you're buying electricity off the grid, there's no way to know where it's actually coming from, a filthy coal plant or from a renewable resource. This means that a company wanting to make sure it buys clean energy has little alternatives, except building its own power generation facilities.
Google has found a way around this, last year, a subsidiary Google Energy LLC, became an accredited wholesale energy supplier. This means that Google can buy and sell energy on the national market.
With its commitment to buy all the energy from the new wind farm for the future 20 years, Google ensures that all of this green energy enters the power grid in the area where it's building its data center.
There's no way of guaranteeing that actual electricity from the wind farm will end up in the data center, but there's not much else you can do. However, this means that whatever energy the data center is consuming is offset by what the wind farm is producing, especially since the data center actually uses a lot less than 100MW.