As our business grows, so does our impact on the Earth’s atmosphere. We have a responsibility to address this impact, and are committed to reducing it as much as possible. We will achieve carbon neutrality by:
1. Increasing the energy efficiency of our own operations,
2. Aggressively pursuing clean and renewable sources of energy,
3. Purchasing carbon offsets for the emissions we can't reduce directly.
Efficiency has always been core to Google’s business. From our very first servers to our latest generation data centers, extracting maximum performance per watt of delivered power has allowed the scale and scope of our services to grow exponentially. We have already accomplished an enormous amount with respect to efficiency, and believe that our data centers are the most efficient in the world.
While many of the innovations that make this efficiency possible are proprietary, sharing some of the details can help improve efficiencies in the computer industry as a whole. The white paper that we released last fall explained one such innovation related to efficient power supplies. And the Climate Savers Computing Initiative will encourage computer manufacturers and purchasers to adhere to aggressive standards, with the potential to cut the energy used by a typical PC by a factor of four.
Besides taking aggressive measures to reduce the carbon footprint associated with running the servers at our data centers, we have taken actions to directly reduce the footprint associated with other aspects of our operations. One first step has been to retrofit our global offices with high efficiency lighting and better building control systems. We are also performing extensive energy audits to better understand how much electricity is being consumed - and where it is being consumed - so we can optimize our systems to demand less energy.
To reduce the impact of employee commutes, we now run the largest corporate shuttle program in the U.S., bringing more than 1,500 Googlers from around the San Francisco Bay area to our corporate headquarters in Mountain View. We also offer a $5,000 employee rebate on the purchase of vehicles with a fuel efficiency of 45 miles per gallon. In our U.S. and European offices, we provide free bicycles to encourage employees to bike to work, and to cycle instead of drive when they travel around our growing corporate campuses.
All of our cafes in Mountain View serve organically produced food whenever possible. They also aim to serve locally-sourced food, which reduces the energy inputs and vehicle miles traveled to serve our employees and guests.
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Aggressively pursuing renewable energy is a key component of our strategy for reducing our carbon footprint.
We are installing renewable energy on-site at our offices. In the spring of 2007 we completed the first major phase of a 1.6 MW solar PV installation at our Mountain View headquarters. Currently, this is the largest single corporate installation in the U.S., but we hope to see even bigger installations in the future. We expect the installation to provide 30 percent of the peak power for the building on which it is installed, and it will pay for itself in roughly seven and a half years; the panels will work for more than 25 years. We are eager to expand our use of onsite renewable energy options at our offices around the world.
We have joined the World Resources Institute’s Green Power Market Development Group to exchange information with energy managers at other leading corporations. Working with members of this group, we are supporting commercialization technologies for generating, storing, and distributing green power -- electricity that can meet our collective need for reliable power that is available 24/7.
Finally, we have set an ambitious goal of creating 50 megawatts of new renewable generating capacity for our data centers by 2012. Towards this end, we will set an internal cost of carbon voluntarily by using a “shadow price,” the theoretical cost of carbon that we expect under a regulatory market. This will allow us to make operational decisions as if there were already a price on carbon. That in turn enables us to include the true cost of power as one of the key criteria in site selection for our data centers -- a cost not yet being recognized by the market, but one that will soon become real through carbon legislation. This is an important tool to reduce the financial risk that our energy investments face, and when evaluating power options, it will also put renewable energy on a level playing field.
Meeting our goal will also require improved regulatory frameworks at the regional and national level. We will advocate for specific changes including a national renewable portfolio standard, increased research and development support, and regional and federal incentives for the deployment of renewable electricity.
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For the remaining piece of our footprint that we can’t eliminate through greater energy efficiency and renewable energy generation, the only way to become carbon neutral in the short term is through carbon offsetting. This is a way to reduce one’s climate impact indirectly, by investing in projects around the world that cut the amount of greenhouse gases being emitted into the atmosphere.
On their own, carbon offsets are not capable of creating the kinds of fundamental changes to our energy infrastructure that will be necessary to stabilize global greenhouse gas emissions to safe levels. But we believe that offsets can offer real, measurable, and additional emissions reductions that allow us to take full responsibility for our footprint today.
We’ve focused on projects where there are already accepted ways of measuring the emissions reductions, which means that we’re confident that their environmental benefits can be quantified. In assessing the projects we plan to support, we sought emissions reductions that :
* Go beyond business as usual
* Offer measurable environmental integrity
* Provide a clear plan for monitoring and verification by a third party
Going beyond business-as-usual is the idea that the offset project activity would not be viable without carbon financing. By requiring this step, we ensure that our investment makes a real difference in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. By using established methodologies and protocols, we will ensure that the project has a real benefit to the environment as a whole, in terms of both the project activity itself and its ancillary benefits. Monitoring and verification is also important so that we can be sure that the reductions are actually taking place, and that the volume of offsets that we purchase is sufficient to cover our carbon footprint.
An example of a project that we have selected is the installation of improved animal waste management systems in small livestock operations in Mexico and Brazil. Normally these operations would store the waste runoff in open lagoons, which emit methane and nitrous oxide, both potent greenhouse gases. Our funding makes it possible for anaerobic digesters to be installed, which capture and flare the biogas produced while simultaneously improving local air quality and reducing land and water contamination.
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