When you conduct a search on Google, your query goes across the Internet, hits a server, gets processed and is sent back to you in microseconds. You would be surprised how much energy is consumed in that process. In its latest quarter, Google spent $2.25 billion on data center and infrastructure spending, a huge area of costs for the company.
That’s one of the reasons the company is aggressively moving to solar, wind and other alternative energies to power its data centers and banks of servers scattered around the world.
If you ask top executives at Google, Apple, Facebook or Microsoft, they will all tell you they are gigantic consumers of energy. And it’s for this reason that top companies in Silicon Valley are in a race to be the leader of clean and renewable energies.
But more than any other, Google is the most aggressive in advancing a clean energy agenda, analysts say. Google has made 15 wind and solar investments totaling more than $1 billion.
"We’ve invested over a billion dollars in 15 projects that have the capacity to produce two gigawatts of power around the world, mostly in the U.S., but that’s the equivalent of Hoover’s Dam worth of power generation," said Rick Needham Google’s director of energy and sustainability, standing along Google’s solar arrays at its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.