Why Google's Green Energy Programs Matter to Nonprofits

Google is, of course, well known for their search engine. What is less known is that Google has also been paving new ground in the area of industry-wide green computing, with a man named Bill Weihl at the helm as their green energy czar.

Why is Google important for the rest of us to be watching — especially for nonprofits? First, they provide products and services that we can all be using to make our own organizations greener. Nonprofits can leverage Google's investment in developing greener online applications on behalf of your own organization. For example, using Google Apps instead of an in-house mail server is leveraging the use of Google's expansive and energy-efficient server farm instead of storing your organization's data using less efficient servers elsewhere. And Google Apps is free for nonprofits, which is especially important to the budget-strapped organization who may want to implement greener practices but lacks the resources to invest in the latest technology.

On a broader scale, Google is leading the charge in adopting energy-efficient technology strategies for their own company, working to change public policy for greener and more sustainable computing and bringing together environmental protection and conservation nonprofits in partnership with corporate technology leaders around the world to find long-term solutions to global energy consumption issues. From using less paper in the office every day when using Google Docs to innovative programs to reduce the cost of renewable energy sources, Google is the company to emulate on the global scale when looking for ways to help your organization adopt greener technology practices.

And Bill Weihl is the prominent leader in the green IT field, leading the company's efforts in energy efficiency and renewable energy programs and also managing Google's greenhouse gas footprint. He spearheaded Google's drive to become carbon-neutral and states that the companyhas been sosince 2007 by maximizing the efficiency of its data centers around the world, subsidizing environmentally friendly transportation for employees and other energy-efficient strategies.

Corporate and Nonprofit Partnerships for Greener Computing

One such strategy was when Weihl helped found the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, which brought companies and nonprofits together to create standards for computing efficiency. The Climate Savers Computing Initiative's mission is to raise the energy efficiency of the world's computing equipment, with the project's primary goal being to reduce computer power consumption by 50 percent by the year 2010. This is equivalent to cutting carbon emissions by 54 million tons — equal to the annual emissions of 11 million cars.

"We have a good model in the Climate Savers Computing Initiative in which several large companies teamed up with the World Wildlife Fund to set simple, ambitious, but achievable environmental targets and then used our combined influence to move the agenda along. I would like to see similar projects for other energy-intensive product areas like cars, heavy equipment, trucks, buses, etc.," said Weihl.

The initiative established the Energy Star 4.0 standards for computers, which requires the power supply in a desktop to be at least 80 percent efficient. Currently, a desktop computer's power supply efficiency is 65 to 70 percent.

Google's proprietary server computers have been using power supplies in their servers that are over 90 percent efficient for at least four years. Google servers use a simple 12-volt power supply, which generates a single voltage. All other voltages required by motherboard components are generated on the motherboard itself via voltage regulator modules (VRMs). The net result of this setup is greater-than-average efficiency at virtually no cost. In addition, the company's data centers use half as much power as the industry average due to innovative cooling technologies like ultra-efficient evaporative cooling.

Overall, Google's energy consumption for computers will decrease at least 50 percent, and possibly 60 to 70 percent over the next two years, according to Weihl.

The costs to consumers and nonprofits purchasing new computers and servers with the Energy Star 4.0 compliancy stacks up like this: Currently, a desktop uses 100 to 150 watts, while a server might use 150 to 300 watts. For a desktop, Weihl estimates it'll cost about $20 more to buy a desktop system that is Energy Star 4.0-compliant. However, the machine will give you an energy savings of $7 to $10 a year. So it'll take two to three years to pay back, which is about the lifespan of a system at a typical organization, though many are in service far longer than that at nonprofits. For a server, Weihl estimates about $30 additional for the increased efficiency, and it can be paid off in about 12 months with the energy savings.

What's the likely impact of people using Energy Star 4.0-compliant equipment? Well, here are some numbers from Weihl. "Yearly shipments of desktops are about 140 million. Yearly shipments of servers are about 10 million. A server uses more energy, it's got a higher power draw, it's on more hours of the day and so on, so maybe desktops overall consume only five times as much energy as servers. Saving 60 to 70 percent of the energy used by those several hundred million desktops today is actually a really big deal. it's distributed across people's homes, it's distributed around office buildings, it's not in central facilities. But in aggregate, it's an enormous amount of energy."

Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal

The Climate Savers Computing Initiative is just one example of a Google-led initiative to make computing greener. They also started the Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal, or RE<C program, whose target is to produce a gigawatt of renewable energy that is cheaper than coal within the next few years.

According to Weihl, "Converting to renewable energy is a huge problem that no company can tackle alone. We will all need to reboot our energy infrastructure, which will require the widespread development and adoption of industrial-use renewable fuels. As long as renewables are two to ten times more expensive than coal, the change won't occur."

With that in mind, Google's plan is to conduct research on producing a gigawatt of renewable energy that ultimately costs less than non-renewable coal in order to find innovative methods for energy production. "If we can help drive down the cost of renewable energy to be cheaper than natural gas, renewables can be competitive with natural gas, which is currently 25 percent of the energy market. If we can demonstrate and do the same with coal, renewables will be competitive with and replace coal, which accounts for roughly half of the current energy market worldwide."

Public Policy Recommendations for Greening Our Future

Google's energy team recently released "Clean Energy 2030," which is a proposal for policy change from 2008 through 2030, in which our world may greatly reduce fossil fuel usage. The proposal gives a path for our public leaders to work toward in embracing cleaner energy policies — not just for technology and IT infrastructure, but for overall consumption, conservation and emissions around the world for decades to come.

As Weihl puts it, "More long-term, I advocate for major R&D investment in new technological advancement in renewable energy. The U.S. government has not done that yet like it has in some areas, such as health. Current government-sponsored R&D in renewable energy is around $2 billion per year compared with the National Institutes of Health's $30 billion allocation. Health is, of course, important, but the catastrophic scale of the climate change problem means that we must invest much, much more than we are currently."

Beyond investment in research and development, Weihl also recommends giving more incentives to make renewable energy a priority in the marketplace. "I would like to see the renewal and strengthening of tax credits and incentives for renewable energy to drive down costs and the learning curve necessary for industry to retool. We have had a start-stop pattern of doing this. The wind energy industry has one- to two-year incentive cycles that serve to get innovation going and then wind down when tax credits stop. The uncertainty of on-again, off-again incentives has hobbled this industry."

The Clean Energy 2030 proposal has recommendations for some of these policies and goes even further — from plug-in electric cars, to solar and wind energy adoption, to increasing jobs in energy-efficient sectors, the proposal makes sweeping policy recommendations toward a cleaner, greener future for the world.

Changing from the Inside-Out

Beyond external programs and policy recommendations for public officials, Google has adopted a variety of internal programs to become more energy efficient — like the 1.6-megawatt solar panel project at their headquarters in Mountain View, California, that help provide one-third of the facility's energy needs at peak times. In addition, they have their own shuttle bus system that moves more than 1500 employees from public transit points around the Bay Area to their Mountain View offices daily. The buses run on biodiesel and are WiFi-capable onboard.

Future plans for Google's increased energy-efficient programs are no less ambitious. They plan to subsidize employee purchases of high mile-per-gallon vehicles in the U.S. and give free bicycles to employees at their European locations to help reduce not only the company's carbon footprint, but also that of their employees. Google.org, the philanthropic arm of the company, has invested $10 million in plug-in hybrid car innovations, called RechargeIT, and also invests funds in solar thermal power and high-altitude wind energy technologies at companies throughout California.

Beyond Google.org's philanthropic green energy investments, Google.com is making substantial headway toward adopting innovative standards for greener computing. Partnering with nonprofits, like the World Wildlife Fund for the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, is one just example of how companies can partner with nonprofit and other social benefit organizations. And internally, Google is a head above many for creating cost- and energy-saving policies to improve their company's mark on the environmental landscape.