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Google saves energy by cooling its buildings with ice
Google's new $700 million data centers in Taiwan will make ice at night, when electricity is significantly cheaper, and use it to cool the buildings during the day. It's called thermal storage, and it's basically a battery, but for air conditioning.
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Google’s seven-person conference bike
NPR did a story about how tech companies encourage bike commuting, which: duh. But Google apparently goes a step further and encourages bike conferencing, via a giant pedaled monstrosity with seven inward-facing seats.
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Critical List: Seattle bans plastic bags; at least 100 million trees died in Texas this year
Seattle is banning retail stores from giving out single-use plastic bags. Paper bags will cost a nickel. Google is investing $94 million in solar projects. As many as 500 million trees died in the Texas drought this year. India could join the U.S. in officially complaining that China's been selling solar panels at too low […]
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Google phases out clean energy R&D in favor of deployment
Cross-posted from Climate Progress. Buried at the bottom of an innocuous “spring cleaning” post on Google’s blog yesterday, the internet giant made a very important announcement: It will stop funding its Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (RE<C) initiative. But that’s not the whole story. And if you believe the headlines — “Google Abandons Renewable Energy […]
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Google drops renewable energy program
Google announced yesterday that it's trashing its Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal program, or or RE<C, as part of its "spring cleaning." (Ugh, Californians. It is nothing like spring right now.) This move puts RE<C in the same category as Google Wave, which was useless from the first moment it existed and was also offed […]
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Google, Facebook reap benefits of building hot data centers in cold Scandinavia
Data centers are the gigantic, Borg-like assemblages of computers that run everything we take for granted on the web, from email to social networks. They take a lot of energy, because they do all the things, but more than that they take a lot of cooling; keeping data centers from overheating requires up to half […]
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Google gets carbon offsets from hog poo
In its recent report on the company's carbon footprint, Google said that it offsets its emissions with high-quality offsets. We are happy as a pig in shit about that. Which is appropriate, because here's one example of what that means: energy powered by pig poop.
The company has invested in a North Carolina project which collects the methane from the waste of 9,000 hogs. A power plant burns the methane to create power for 35 homes a year. -
Critical List: Obama called for green schools, better infrastructure; Google shares carbon footprint
In his jobs speech, President Obama called for the construction of green schools and an infrastructure bank that could help create public transportation and efficient buildings.
With an average temperature of 74.5 degrees F, this summer was the second hottest on record in the U.S. (The hottest summer was in 1936, when it was 74.6 degrees F. We're gonna beat that soon.)
Google reveals its carbon footprint, which is smaller than an oil company's and about the same as a chemical company's. -
How Gmail saves energy
There are a lot of benefits to cloud computing. For instance, if you believe the commercials, it lets you replace your family’s heads with better heads! Also, it saves you storage space and means you can access your data with multiple devices. But this might be the best argument so far: Switching from local email […]