I am excerpting on this blog roughly 10% of my next book, The New Technology Elite due out in February (and available for pre-order on Amazon – see badge on left) . Chapters 6 through 17 cover 12 attributes of what I call the elite. Each also has a case study. Here is the excerpts from the Google case study, for Chapter 17 which focused on being Sustainable. Note: the text is going through the publisher’s edits and subject to change.
“Jim Miller has an impressive resume. His career includes stints at:
Intel, at the birth of the Pentium; Amazon.com, in the early stages of e-commerce; Cisco, when broadband exploded; First Solar, as part of the green/solar resurgence; and now Google, where as Vice President for Worldwide Operations he is in the engine room for the emergence of cloud computing.22
Most of his employers prior to Google had hardware/logistics elements. So as he was being recruited by Google, he wondered how different it would be to work for a software company for a change. Even after months of due diligence on both sides, “My job offer letter had so few details about the operations I would be running, that I had to take a leap of faith in joining Google,” says Miller. That is no surprise, since Google is extremely secretive about its global operations.
Of course, this “software” company has lots of physical assets in its data centers, self-driving cars, and leased satellites that Miller is admirably qualified to optimize. And they are at a scale that challenges even a rocket scientist like Miller. “
“So, Google buys electricity directly from a renewable project developer in the form of a power purchase agreement, or PPA. Their first PPA was with NextEra Energy Resources. Google agreed to buy 114 MW of wind power for 20 years from a project in Ames, Iowa, directed to a data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa. In Oklahoma, they added just over 100 MW of wind power for the data center in Mayes County. Since then, Google has announced another commitment of $38.8 million with NextEra in North Dakota.
This is where the energy reselling is involved. Google sells the power acquired under the PPAs back to the grid at the local, wholesale price. Today, because generic “grid” power is cheaper than renewable power, this may result in a slight net loss for Google, but longer-term, Google is betting the economics will reverse. In the process of selling, Google strips the renewable energy credits (RECs) to apply in the next step.”
“Google has been investing in various start-ups to gain access to other forms of renewable energy. BrightSource and eSolar focus on concentrated solar energy and use swiveling mirrors to reflect sunlight to heat towers of water. The resulting steam is used to generate electricity.
The investments in AltaRock Energy and Potter Drilling were to get access to enhanced geothermal energy. The principle is to drill deep enough to get to the hot core of the earth, then pump water into it and use the resulting steam to create energy. Think of them as manmade geysers.
Google also invested in a company called Makani Power which is leveraging high-altitude wind. One of their concepts is to fly kites with propellers. As the propellers spin they act like turbines, and the power is circled down a cable back to the ground.”
“In 2010, Google took over a former paper mill in Hamina, Finland, and retrofitted it into a data center. It continues to use a seawater tunnel that was built for the paper mill in the 1950s. The seawater passes through four different straining systems. This reduces corrosion from the salt and other minerals in the seawater before it reaches the heat exchanger and is used to cool the data center. On the way out, water then moves to a tempering building, where it mixes with a separate source of the seawater, so it is cooled before returning to the Gulf of Finland. The goal is to “return to a temperature that is much more similar to the inlet temperature, so as to minimize environmental impact in this area.”27
Google’s experience at Hamina and with every new data center it opens around the world adds to a sizable bag of tricks from a decade of running data centers. It increasingly shares with the world some of the best practices it has accumulated. “
“Google has also built the largest corporate installation of solar panels at headquarters campus in Mountain View, CA. Over 9,000 solar panels means that the “installed capacity of this solar grid is 1.6MW. . . . In one day the system generated 9,468 kilowatt-hours of electricity. This is enough electricity to power 83,000 hours of flat-screen TV viewing each day.”30 Google was an early adopter of Bloom Energy’s boxes on its campus, “Over the first 18 months the project has had 98 percent availability and delivered 3.8 million kWh of electricity.”31
Photo Credit: Google
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