Google Bought Enough Wind Power To Match 100 Percent Of Its Energy Use From 2017
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
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...sort electrons.
I don't believe that Google shuts down on windless nights in California, and there are these.
If they built a huge land wasting greasy mess such as is pictured in the OP - the conceit of wind proponents is that there is no such thing as a desert ecosystem, and if there were it wouldn't matter - that would be one thing, but if they are just buying Californian electricity, then they are running on dangerous natural gas. In 2016, the last nuclear plant in California - due to be shut in 2025 owing to appeals to fear and ignorance - produced more electricity (6.52%) in a single building than all the wind turbines in California (4.65%).
We may compare a photograph of this building with the ugly mess in the desert in the OP:
California Electricity Breakdown (Source: California Energy Commission Website, accessed 12/02/2017)
California's hydroelectric facilities have recovered after years of drought. By preventing a drop of water from ever getting to Mexico in the Colorado River, leading to the complete destruction of the delta ecosystem that thrived there for millions of years, California has long been a leader in hydroelectricity, but I think they're fresh out of rivers to destroy, and with climate change it is likely they may eventually be fresh out of water.
Hydroelectricity, which like other forms of so called "renewable energy" is unreliable and unpredictable over the long term, as the recent drought showed.
The largest single contributor to California's electricity is dangerous natural gas (34.02%). Because California has no intention of ever phasing out dangerous natural gas, it is completely and totally free to both mine and purchase dangerous natural gas, burn it without restriction, and dump the waste directly into the atmosphere, where it is accumulating, on a planetary scale, at a rate that would have been astounding just 20 years ago.
I used to live in California, where I was an airhead who believed in the "renewable energy nirvana" that like Godot, never came. I grew up and changed my mind.
So called "renewable energy" has not worked, is not working, and will not work.
"Feel good" posts like these are nothing more than marketing, and that's how Google makes money, marketing.
Enjoy the weekend.
