Electricity is the driving force behind every aspect of our modern society. As electrification, industrial growth, and digitalization bring new benefits to communities across the world, they’re also bringing new energy requirements. Data centers serve as a crucial backbone to this increasingly interconnected world and have a growing strategic role in how the world meets energy demand. Powering data centers with reliable, affordable, and clean electricity allows the industry to responsibly support the expansion of innovative technologies and services shaping our present day. Furthermore, it is a critical choice that Google is making to enable a more sustainable future.
At Google, our commitment to the transition towards a clean energy future remains central to our sustainable data center operations strategy. From 2010 to 2023, we signed more than 115 agreements to purchase over 14GW of clean energy generation capacity—the equivalent of more than 36 million solar panels. Through these agreements, we estimate that we’ll spend more than 16 billion USD to purchase clean energy through 2040. In 2017, we became the first major company to match 100 percent of our global, annual electricity consumption with renewable energy purchases, and we have continued to accomplish this every year since.
This 100 percent match proved an important milestone, but our experience showed that we needed to go further to fully decarbonize our electricity consumption and accelerate the transition to fully zero-carbon electricity grids. By 2030, Google aims to run our operations on carbon-free energy (CFE) everywhere, at all times. This means purchasing carbon-free energy to match the electricity consumption of our data centers and offices around the world, every hour of every day.
We believe that the significant progress we’ve made should not be kept exclusive or unique to Google—corporate energy buyers everywhere, including other hyperscalers, can collectively play a powerful role in accelerating the global transition to a carbon-free future.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joe Kava is Vice President of Global Data Centers at Google. He leads the teams responsible for research, engineering, construction management, critical facility operations, environmental health and safety, quality, sustainability, and physical security for Google’s global fleet of data centers. Kava joined Google in 2008, after a career in both commercial data centers and the semiconductor industry. He is a staunch advocate for building sustainable data centers and implementing Google’s cloud computing strategy. He is also passionate about educating the global data center industry.
Outside of Google, Kava is a dedicated board member of two leading 501(c)(3) organizations in his community: The Tech Interactive and The Sean Brock Foundation. He is also an advisory committee member for Infrastructure Masons and The BroadGroup. Kava is the recipient of the Infrastructure Masons Luminary Award and has been named an Industry Titan by InterGlobix Magazine.
