Low Impact

Google seem to have been pretty active in the environmental space - I’ve seen a number of headlines recently about their funding of hybrid car technology, as well as their plans to incorporate Solar Photovoltaic power into their energy mix. And lets face it - when you have as many computers as Google, you need quite a bit of power!

It turns out they’ve made great strides in implementing solar power, and neat little web page to go with it. Check out:

http://www.google.com/corporate/solarpanels/home

At this web page you can see how much solar energy they’ve generated over the last 24 hours and the last 7 days. They’ve also taken the useful step of breaking down what this amount of energy means in everyday terms. For instance, “the equivalent energy to doing 3,600 loads of laundry”.

The numbers are impressive (9,900 kwH in a day when I checked!), and apparently can meet 30% of their peak energy demands. Even more impressive is a picture of the Google buildings from above - it seems like every flat surface has a solar cell on it!

Its fantastic to see a large company taking this step, and even better to be able to see exactly what that step means in terms of KwH generated. Given that 1 KwH results in roughly 1 Kg of CO2 being emitted when electricity is generated at a coal power station, it looks like Google’s solar cells are saving almost 10 tonnes of CO2 going into the atmosphere every day!

Great work Google!

Categories: environment, environmental, green, solar