The need to switch from costly fossil fuels to carbon-free energy sources has never been greater.Concern for the environment has never been greater, and people all over Europe are feeling the uncertainty regarding energy supply.
We at Google are committed to being a helpful partner and locating means by which we can have an impact that is significant and scalable.This means helping other businesses, individuals, and governments reduce their own emissions as well as assisting us in achieving our own goal of operating on carbon-free energy throughout the day and night by the year 2030.
A cleaner cloud in the UK and Spain Today, we are pleased to announce that two new clean energy projects are bringing additional clean energy to the grid, putting our cloud regions and offices in the UK and Spain on track to operate at or near 90% carbon-free energy by 2025.
We have matched renewable energy for 100% of our annual electricity use since 2017, but this goes further by matching the electricity used by Google cloud regions and offices in the UK and Spain on an hourly basis with local, carbon-free energy sources.
Our first-ever long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs) in Spain and the UK led to this announcement:149 megawatts of solar power from ibVogt in Spain and 100 megawatts of offshore wind power from ENGIE in the UK.
By supporting the development of brand-new wind and solar farms,
these deals contribute fresh, clean energy to the electricity grids of their respective nations.Together with Finland, Iowa, Montreal, Oregon, and Toronto, they help establish the UK and Spain as two of our cleanest cloud regions worldwide, operating at or near 90% CFE.
This is especially exciting because it enables us to assist a greater number of businesses, governments, and other organizations in utilizing Google Cloud to digitally transform their operations in a sustainable manner.Using our Region picker tool, cloud customers outside of Spain and the UK can choose to run their workloads from any of our green regions (including Spain and the UK).
For customers like Rightmove, reducing the carbon footprint of digital infrastructure is a key sustainability objective for the business. As this aligns with our own goals to reduce our carbon emissions, Google Cloud’s commitment to fully decarbonize its operations had a significant impact on our decision to move services to the platform..””The Head of Technology Operations at Rightmove, Andrew Tate, stated, “This announcement demonstrates the effort they’re putting behind reaching their target and, in turn, assisting us with our net-zero journey.”
“We welcome this additional renewable energy project and Google’s overall carbon-free energy approach,”
stated Javier Rodriguez Soler, Global Head of Sustainability at BBVA, the leading banking institution in Spain.BBVA’s use of the Madrid region of Google Cloud aids in the reduction of our IT operations’ carbon footprint and supports our path toward sustainability.
A carbon-free future in Europe and beyond These new milestones represent continued progress toward our objective of operating on carbon-free energy around the clock by 2030. This will guarantee that every email you send through Gmail, every question you ask Google Search, and every YouTube video you watch are supported by data centers where the energy is hourly matched with local, carbon-free sources.
We have signed more than 25 wind and solar agreements in Europe to purchase nearly 2.5 gigawatts of renewable power—the equivalent of nearly 7.5 million solar panels—since we began purchasing renewable energy in 2010.
We inaugurated brand-new clean energy projects in three European nations this year, including a first-of-its-kind battery project in Belgium, Danish solar projects, and Finnish wind projects.We have seen research from Technische Universität Berlin highlight theimpact all day, every day without carbon energy objectives can have on decarbonizationand on making a stronger framework.In addition, just a month ago, we made the announcement that Google would collaborate with C40 Cities, a global network of mayors who are taking immediate action to address the climate crisis, to launch a new 24-hour carbon-free energy for cities program. This program will assist cities like Copenhagen, London, and Paris in developing and implementing scalable strategies for decarbonizing urban energy consumption.
