This week Google announced an investment of $94 million into 4 different solar PV projects that will be built by Recurrent Energy near Sacramento, California. This project should generate enough electricity to power approximately 13,000 US homes in a clean, environmentally friendly way.
The investment, made on Tuesday, is not the first step that Google have taken in an attempt to assist the progressive movement towards renewable, green energy. In 2011 alone the corporate giant invested more than $880 million across a variety of projects – contributing to an overall clean energy portfolio worth almost $1 billion.
This latest development represents Google’s first major investment in the U.S. in which solar PV power plants will generate energy for the power grid. Previous projects involved the provision of funding to help more than 10,000 homeowners install PV panels on their rooftops.
Google stresses the importance of renewable energy to their overall corporate strategy. Axel Martinez speaks on behalf of Google on the organisation’s official blog with the following statement:
“We (Google) believe that investing in the renewable energy sector makes business sense and hope clean energy projects continue to attract new sources of capital to help the world move towards a more sustainable energy future.”
Google is considered to be very proactive in their quest to make the world a greener, cleaner environment via renewable energy investment; setting an ambitious target of reducing the global organisation’s carbon footprint to zero.
Within their eco-strategy, both efficiency and carbon offset are two important elements; however, a an impactful third prong of the strategy involves the purchase and use of carbon-free renewable electricity to power the organisations enormous data centres via power purchase agreements (PPAs).
These green PPAs involve contracts where power is bought from a renewable energy project developer over a period of time at a negotiated price from a particular activity. Google will select a project that is on the same power grid as one of their data centres so that the power generated by the project could conceivably be used by their data centre in that location.
More can be read about Google and PPAs on their official website – where full details on the organisation’s green strategy that extends beyond the traditional realms of CSR can be found.
