How Google’s Data Centers Use Renewable Energy

We’ve previously covered Google’s announcement of Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) to add wind power to utility grids that support its data centers in Council Bluffs, Iowa and Pryor, Oklahoma. Google says it expects these two agreements alone to account for 15 percent of its company-wide energy usage by the end of 2012, pushing its overall renewable mix to 35 percent. As part of its new initiative on discussing its energy usage, Google has put together a video that provides a user-friendly overview of its PPAs and how renewable energy fits into its data center strategy – including why it doesn’t currently deploy wind turbines or photovoltaic solar arrays at its data center campuses. This video runs about 2 minutes.

For more on energy efficiency, see our Green Data Centers Channel. For additional video, check out our Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

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About Rich Miller

Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.