More Swedish wind power for our Finnish data centre

We’re keen to make sure that our data centres around the world use as much renewable energy as possible. By entering into long-term agreements with wind farm developers over the past few years, we’ve been able to increase the amount of renewable energy we consume while helping enable the construction of new facilities.

Today we announced that we’ve signed a new power purchase agreement (PPA) in Sweden (our second such agreement there in less than 12 months). We will buy the entire electricity output of four as-yet-unbuilt wind farms in southern Sweden, at a fixed price, for the next ten years.

Windfarm developer Eolus Vind will build four wind farms, in Alered, Mungseröd, Skalleberg and Ramsnäs, Sweden. The 29-turbine project, with a total combined capacity of 59MW, already has all relevant planning approvals and permits and will become fully operational in early 2015.

Picture: Our seawater-cooled data centre in Hamina, Finland

Once completed, the wind farms will provide Google’s Hamina, Finland, data centre with additional renewable energy as the facility expands in coming years.

Buying renewable energy in Sweden and consuming it in Finland is possible thanks to Europe’s increasingly integrated power markets, in particular the Nord Pool spot market. This allows Google to buy renewable energy with Guarantee of Origin certification in Sweden, “retire” the certificates and then consume an equivalent amount of power elsewhere in Europe.



This marks our sixth long-term agreement to purchase renewable energy. We keep signing these contracts for two main reasons: they make great financial sense for us, and increase the amount of renewable energy available in the grid, which is great for the environment too.

Posted by Francois Sterin, Director, Global Infrastructure Team

Slovakia’s Eagle flies high with the Internet

It has been an audacious flight, monitored and protected by the Internet. Slovakia’s Lesser Spotted Eagle risked extinction until the Slovak Ministry of Environment and the Tatra National Park launched an ambitious preservation project. Under the seven year old program, young eagles are fitted with transmitters and systematically monitored. This year, we partnered with the Ministry and the National park, offering Google Earth to track an eagle named "Arnold" in an attempt to keep him safe on his its migration route to South Africa.

So far, four million views have been recorded tracking Arnold’s path south into Africa. National television broadcasts weekly updates headlined “Follow the Slovak Eagle.” Earlier this month, the bird vanished near the Kundelungu National Park in Congo. Arnold’s followers became increasingly worried that something bad had happened to him. But after 14 days of silence, Arnold’s transmitter signal reappeared this week from Zambia.



In less than a decade, the preservation project has managed to save 15 Lesser Spotted Eagles and stabilize their total population in Slovakia. Baby eaglets are collected from nests, carefully picked out in advance, when they are approximately five days old, in order to prevent their murder by parents. They then temporarily placed in a Rescue Station where a foster mother takes care of them and feeds them. When the young birds can feed by themselves and regulate their body temperature, they are released into the wild.

Now, thanks to the Internet, they can continue to be followed and protected. The Tatra National Park plans to reach out to other national park administrations in the European Union to speak about their lessons learned and promote the use of the internet in forestry

Posted by Ondrej Socuvka, Policy Manager Google Slovakia

Following the lead of nature's engineers

Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog

It’s no surprise that Google appreciates engineers. And this Earth Day, we’re looking at some of our favorite engineers from nature to see how they can teach us to treat the environment better. We’ve created a website where we can see the beauty and ingenuity of the natural world through photos from National Geographic. We also want to provide easy ways to be greener in our own lives, so this site shows us how we can all be like those organisms by taking simple actions to care for the environment.

For instance, until recently I’d never heard of a remora. Turns out that these fish latch on to other ocean creatures such as whales and turtles to catch rides. In a way, these fish are using their own form of mass transit. To be like the remora and travel with a lighter footprint, we can plan trips using rapid transit. Or we can be inspired by bears—the true experts on “sleep mode”—to save energy in our own lives by adjusting our home thermostat and using energy efficient appliances.

Our doodle today also acknowledges the interconnections of the natural world. You can interact with elements of the environment to affect the seasons, weather and wildlife.

As another way to move from awareness to action, we’re hosting a Google+ Hangout On Air series focused on pressing environmental issues. We’ll kick it off today at 12pm ET with a Hangout on Air connecting NASA (live from Greenland), National Geographic explorers from around the world, and Underwater Earth (live from the Great Barrier reef). Throughout the week, we’ll hold daily Hangouts on Air covering topics such as clean water and animal conservation.

This Earth Day and every day, let’s take a moment to marvel at the wonder of nature and do our part to protect the natural ecosystem we all depend on. A salute to nature’s engineers!

Posted by Erin Reilly, Google Green team

An update on our carbon footprint and sustainability efforts

Cross-posted from the Google Green Blog

Last year we published Google’s 2010 carbon footprint data for the first time on our Google Green site, and today we’re updating the site with information about our 2011 footprint. We’re also thrilled to report that we’re featured in the Carbon Disclosure Project’s 2012 Carbon Disclosure Leadership Index for a second year.

As we grow our services, we’re doing so in a responsible way. The Internet continues to see explosive growth: we’ve found over 30 trillion unique URLs on the web, up from 1 trillion in 2008. Our servers index 20 billion pages a day, receive 100 billion search queries a month, and support 425 million Gmail users—among many other services. Because we’re carbon neutral, we do all that work with a carbon footprint of zero, minimizing our impact on climate change.

We like to be thorough, so when calculating our carbon footprint we go beyond the typical approach. We cover not only employee business travel, but also daily commuting. We track the miles driven by our self-driving cars and Street View vehicles. And when it comes to our data centers, we take a “kitchen sink” approach—that is, we throw just about everything in. We include data center construction and server manufacturing as well as the energy used by Google-built data centers, leased facilities (called “colos”) and other third-party facilities around the world that house Google equipment. 

Our carbon footprint in 2011, before offsetting it, was 1,677,423 metric tons CO2e. As a normal result of continuing to provide more and better services to more users, our energy consumption in 2011 increased in absolute terms, but not in relative terms. In other words, it’s growing less quickly than our business. Our carbon footprint per million dollars of revenue—a measure of carbon intensity commonly used to track corporate sustainability—has decreased by an average of 10% each year since 2009.

Our data centers hit a new low this year—in a good way. The average power usage effectiveness (PUE) across our global fleet of data centers has dropped to our lowest (AKA best) yet: 1.13 (with some facilities dipping as low as 1.08 earlier this year). This means we’ve managed to reduce the amount of energy we use on cooling and other overhead to just 13%.

Our campus sustainability programs are thriving. Last year, our shuttle program saw a 60% increase in ridership, and Googlers drove our fleet of hybrid and electric vehicles over 220,000 miles. The combination of our employee shuttle system and our electric vehicle infrastructure takes the equivalent of about 3,000 cars off the road every year. And we’re proud to have over 6 million square feet of building space around the world set to achieve LEED certification.

We continue to look for and implement new ways to reduce our impact on the environment while we increase our impact on sustainability, green energy, and clean technologies. We look forward to reporting back next year on our latest numbers, innovations, and activities.

Posted by Rick Needham, Director, Energy and Sustainability

Where roads aren't - and why it matters

(Throughout this week we'll be publishing a series of posts on our Green Blog about our activities at Rio+20, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. Our full schedule at the conference is available here, and follow our activities as they happen at #googleatrio20.)

On Friday, we unveiled at the Rio+20 Conference the initial fruits of a unique collaboration with a member of the European Parliament and the Society for Conservation Biologists: a global, interactive map of the world’s “Roadless Areas.”

The project came about when we were approached by MEP Kriton Arsenis, the European Parliament´s Rapporteur on forests. He explained that, while most people using Google Maps want to know which roads will get them from point A to point B, the same information is useful for conservationists who want to know where roads aren’t. In his words:

The concept of "roadless areas" is a well-established conservation measure coming from conservation biologists from all around the globe. The idea is that roads in most parts of the world lead to the unmanageable private access to the natural resources of an area, most often leading to ecosystem degradation and without the consent of the local and indigenous communities. Keeping an area roadless means that the specific territory is shielded against such exogenous pressures, thus sustaining its ecosystem services at the maximum possible level. An important tool which will drive environmental, development as well as global climate change policy forward will be the Google development of an interactive satellite map of the world's roadless areas.

We were intrigued by Kriton’s idea, so we decided to give it a try.

Start with where the Roads ARE

We started by taking all the road data (plus rail and navigable waterways) in Google maps today, and importing that into our Google Earth Engine platform for analysis. For example, here is what the road network in Australia looks like when zoomed out to country-scale:

Australia road network – coastal population centers such as Sydney, Perth and Adelaide show up as dense road networks, whereas the interior “Outback” is more sparse.

Then figure out where the roads AREN’T

Based upon advice from Kriton Arsenis and his project collaborators in the Society for Conservation Biology, we decided to define a “Roadless Area” (for the purposes of this prototype map) as any area of land more than ten kilometers from the nearest road. Using the global-scale spatial-analytic capabilities of Google Earth Engine, we then generated this raster map, such that every pixel in the map is color-coded based on distance from the nearest road. Every pixel colored green is at least ten km from the nearest road, and therefore considered part of a Roadless Area. For example:

Prototype “Roadless Areas” in Australia - all green areas are at least 10 km from the nearest road

Or consider the island of Madagascar, home to some of the most unique species on Earth.

Prototype “Roadless Areas” on the island of Madagascar, home of the endangered Indri lemur.

From these maps it becomes more apparent how the simple construction of new roads can fragment and disturb habitats, potentially driving threatened species closer to extinction.

Finally we decided to try running this “Roadless Area” algorithm at global-scale:

Prototype “Roadless Area” interactive map at global scale.

Large roadless areas are readily apparent such as the Amazon and Indonesian rainforests, Canadian boreal forest and Sahara desert.

Caveats and Next Steps

The road data used to produce these maps inevitably contains inaccuracies and
omissions. The good news is that Google already has a tool, Google Map Maker, that can be used by anyone to submit new or corrected map data, and in fact this tool is already being used in partnership with the United Nations to support global emergency response.

We look forward to continued development of this prototype, which can help to turn the abstract concept of “Roadless Areas” into something quite concrete and, we hope, useful to policymakers, scientists and communities around the world.

To explore these Roadless Area maps yourself, visit the Google Earth Engine Map Gallery.

Posted by Rebecca Moore, Manager, Google Earth Outreach and Google Earth Engine