Google’s data centres and the offices for its 60,000 staff will be powered entirely by renewable energy from next year, in what the company has called a “landmark moment”.
The internet giant is already the world’s biggest corporate buyer of renewable electricity, last year buying 44% of its power from wind and solar farms. Now it will be 100%, and an executive said it would not rule out investing in nuclear power in the future.
Oman said it had taken Google five years to reach the 100% target, set in 2012, because of the complexity involved with negotiating power purchase agreements.
The company’s biggest demand for energy is its data centres and it admits their overall thirst for power is growing.
Google was now looking to sign 10-year agreements for low-carbon power that was not intermittent, such as hydro, biomass and nuclear.
“We want to do contracts on renewable power, it could be biomass if the fuel source is sustainable, it could be nuclear. We’re looking at all forms of low-carbon generation.”
But he said new nuclear power was “controversial”, the safety implications were much more “dramatic” than with renewables, and the price was “much more difficult to ascertain” when funding solar panels and wind turbines.
“We don’t want to rule out signing a nuclear contract if it meets our goals of low price, safety, additionality, we don’t want to rule that out, but today we can’t positively say there are nuclear projects out there that meet this criteria,” he said.
The company’s 100% renewable energy does not mean Google is getting all its energy directly from wind and solar power, but that on an annual basis the amount it purchases from renewable sources matches the electricity its operations consume.