You have to give Google credit for spreading around some of the loot that they have made via the internet to help fund "green" energy projects. As you probably have heard, Google chipped in $55 million toward the cost of building a really big wind turbine project in Southern California's Tehachapi Mountains, which is being built by Terra-Gen Power. The project is named the Alta Wind Energy Center. What amazed me was the scale of the project. When fully built out it will be producing 1,500 MW and increase California's wind generation by 30%. That will power a whole lot of EVs and will do so even during the evening, which solar power doesn't do all that well.
In a related item, last week the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved investment incentives for a Google-backed project to build a $5 billion undersea power line for wind farms along the Atlantic coast. That project is still awaiting the issuance of building permits from federal and state regulators.
In April, Google also announced that it had signed a $100 million, 20-year deal to buy 100 MW of power from a new wind power farm in Oklahoma, where Google is building a data center. (I wonder how fast those turbines spin when hit by a tornado?) Data centers like Google's are estimated to consume about 3% of all the electricity produced in the U.S. this year, according to the U.S. EPA, at a cost of about $9 billion.
Last summer Google created Google Energy to buy clean power and resell it to wholesalers.
This information was plucked from a newspaper article written by Frank Michael Russell and Peter Delevett of the Mercury News.
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Topic: Google's green energy investments (Read 1304 times)