![]() Facebook is the world’s largest corporate procurer of renewables so far this year. Google said it reached this goal last year. ![]() Several household names such as Apple Inc, Microsoft Corp, eBay Inc and Etsy Inc have set targets to be 100% powered by clean energy. The tech industry has become the biggest corporate buyer of renewables, inking deals for 10.4 gigawatts to date, according to Bloomberg NEF. Electricity is by far the primary operating cost for a datacentre. By signing a long-term power purchase agreement, known as a PPA, Google and companies like it are able to lock in a predictable price for their electricity and guarantee to investors and environmental groups that they’re not increasing coal use. ![]() The power comes from wind farms built by NextEra Energy Inc and Chermac Energy Corp. Those include Gmail and G-chat messages to photos and videos saved in Google Drive. They’re transmitting and storing trillions of bytes of information every day from applications supporting Google, which is owned by Alphabet Inc. At the Mayes County datacentre in Pryor, about 45 miles east of Tulsa, halls are lined with blinking servers behind glass doors. Google and its competitors are alive to that issue. “If they get powered by coal and contribute to climate change, its going to make it a lot harder to make that transition to renewables sources.” “This infrastructure has a 15 to 20-year lifespan,” said Gary Cook, a senior IT sector analyst and energy campaigner at the environmental group Greenpeace. ![]() The incoming wave of data will only increase their energy use, and whatever powers those machines will have an impact on greenhouse-gas pollution. Rising power use is a reputational risk for the tech industry, since rising coal use to feed its server farms clashes with many company’s green ambitions. The International Energy Agency puts the figure at 1% worldwide but says accurate estimates are difficult to make. The research group estimates datacentres worldwide draw as much as 2% to 3% of electricity demand in developed nations. The number of connected devices is expected to grow 12% annually, jumping from 27 billion last year to 138 billion in 2030, according to forecasts from IHS Markit. Items from thermostats to kettles that once stood alone in households increasingly are linked to the Web, creating data in the process that companies like Google are having to manage. “We have 15 datacentres that are live, and we’re building out more.”Ĭisco expects the torrent of data to increase 75% by 2021 as more things are connected to the Internet. “We spend a lot of time chasing renewable energy to match our consumption,” said Neha Palmer, head of energy strategy at Google, which is owned by Alphabet. The answer for them is increasingly to line up long-term contracts for green electricity, adding momentum to the shift away from fossil fuels. It’s also posing a dilemma for companies like Facebook Inc and Google’s owner Alphabet Inc, whose data hordes are making them more prominent energy consumers at the same moment investors are increasing their scrutiny of their stewardship of the environment. That’s the equivalent of streaming 32 billion hours of Netflix, and it makes big tech companies some of the fastest growing energy consumers. Worldwide, datacentres like the Mayes County site outside Tulsa handle almost 32 quintillion bytes of information each day, according to Cisco Global Cloud Index. Dozens of wind turbines each standing 260 feet tall spin in the breeze on the plains of Oklahoma, feeding electricity for a Google datacentre about 180 miles away.
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