Google to buy renewable energy only for 2017 operations

Purchases have hit 2.6GW of wind and solar energy.

In quite a dramatic blog post, Urs Hölzle, Google's senior vice president for technical infrastructure, announced that in 2017 Google will reach 100% renewable energy for its global operations — including both data centers and offices.

"We were one of the first corporations to create large-scale, long-term contracts to buy renewable energy directly; we signed our first agreement to purchase all the electricity from a 114-megawatt wind farm in Iowa, in 2010. Today, we are the world’s largest corporate buyer of renewable power, with commitments reaching 2.6 gigawatts (2,600 megawatts) of wind and solar energy. That’s bigger than many large utilities and more than twice as much as the 1.21 gigawatts it took to send Marty McFly back to the future," he said.

To reach this goal Google will be directly buying enough wind and solar electricity annually to account for every unit of electricity its operations consume, globally. They're focusing on creating new energy from renewable sources, so they will only buy from projects that are funded by their own purchases.

View the full blog post here.