For years, the search giant has touted its alt-energy deals and net zero plans. But these four charts show that Google’s electricity use, CO2 emissions, and carbon intensity, are soaring.
I recently read the book "The Ecotechnic future" and the author predicts that we are entering a period of scarcity-industrialism. You can see that in the mining push for uneconomical rare earth extraction to support the tech industry. I suspect google will find themselves having difficulty in data-center-expansion in the future for this reason. Their increase in carbon footprint is partially expansion and partially that resources necessary for "environmentally friendly" options are beginning to run short.
Is all of this bad? These are stats. if the search and videos were divided among three or four companies do you think they would use less energy? If not then the challenge is to go pedal to the metal on SMR's and other energy. Otherwise, none of your impressive stats matter.
In 2015, Google changed its corporate motto from "Don't be evil" to "Do the right thing (for Google)". They realized that the former was a lie and the new motto can keep the parenthetical silent to sound better.
1) Back in 2007, Google had a simple idea for addressing global warming — we just need to take existing renewable-energy technologies and keep improving them until they were as cheap as fossil fuels. They started a lavishly funded a project called RE-C (renewable energy - carbon-based energy). They plowed millions of $ into the project, and to this day, are part owners of the Ivanpah solar project. In 2011 they gave up. Because they realized it wouldn't work - we could never make wind and solar cheap enough or plentiful enough to solve the problem. Again, they tried to solve the problem in 2011 and concluded the problem was unsolvable using wind and solar. And that there was no pathway to EVER solving the problem that way.
2) Computation is directly connected to energy. The more you compute, the more energy you will use. To put it another way, information requires the expenditure of energy to be created. They literally can't grow their business without using more energy.
3) The recent success of the Fervo energy project in Nevada is the first ray of hope for Google. It is possible for them to greatly supplement their energy sources using this method, and better yet, it can be used virtually anywhere they decide to locate a data center, and even co-located.
The cost of geothermal is based on the cost to drill - the cost for the power plant is negligible. The cost to drill was based on the depth to hot temps. Hence the focus on geologically active areas. Geothermal systems move heat rather than generate it. It may have lower efficiency, but that is irrelevant, since it has a much, much lower operating cost. Horizontal drilling means that a single geothermal power plant can collect heat over a much wider area. They drill vertical wells several hundred meters apart and connect them underground through horizontal drilling. This lets them move fluid along a larger segment of rock underground, producing more steam and making the wells far more efficient.
The DOE and MIT think they can reduce the cost of geothermal by 90%. The google plant is 115 MW. It is online, now. You can see it, measure its output, everything. They also just broke ground on a 400 MW plant in Utah
Do I think you can power the world with geothermal? No. Do I think you could power Nevada? yes. Do I think you could supplement a large fraction of Google's data center energy use? Yes.
Drilling technology has taken a massive leap in ability and quality since around 2010.
I'm saying your knowledge of DRILLING is 20 years out of date. A "good heat source" is no longer required for geothermal - we can drill deeper and collect heat from a much wider area. Hence the massive cost improvements. Again, they have built/are building these systems right now. None of this is speculative.
The "nonstandard" stuff is BS - it is absolutely standardized and has been for about 10 years now.
190 power plants, 3.2 GW capacity, installed worldwide, by one company, most of it installed in the last 10 years. Again, you talk like someone stuck in 2010 or so.
The rest is utter nonsense. Yes, you select a good location to drill. How is that a drawback? In the olden days, we need to find a natural source of steam to exploit. Since you were exploiting this natural source, your extraction rate could not exceed the replenishment rate. You also suffered the vagrancies of what was happening in the subsurface. That said, the first geothermal power plant ever built, built in 1904 in Italy, is still making power.
Stop thinking you understand something you clearly don't. Read up on where we are TODAY, not stuff from 10-20 years ago.
As to Fervo - "Funny California doesn't want to reveal the cost of the PPAs they have with Fervo." I assume you mean the 320 MW contract Southern California Edison signed with Fervo in June 28? It's 15-year agreement for 24/7 carbon-free geothermal energy, California PUC unanimously approved the deal. The price is just under $100 per megawatt-hour, compared to $23 per MWh for intermittent solar and $43 per MWh for a combined-cycle gas plant. They charge more because it is worth more, being fully dispatchable. Took me all of 5 minutes to find the cost of this "secret" number, in the pages of the LA Times no less. Sheesh.
"Steam plant is still more expensive than conventional steam plants. "
The power plant for geothermal is not more expensive than the steam plant for conventional power plants - where in the world did you hear that? If anything, it is cheaper, since it usually operating at lower temps and pressures. Flash steam plants, at $2,500/kwh installed. Binary plants are maybe $3,000/kwh. The tech for binary plants has been around since the 1980s.
Drilling is over half the costs for geothermal power, and a single well can cost $10 million, with a 20% risk of failure. For a large power plant, I might drill 30 wells. That has been the problem. $600 million with a 20% chance of losing $300 million of my investment.
"What part of average geothermal heat flux is 10,000X lower than even the meager 1000w/sq. m. solar heat flux, do you have trouble understanding."
Well, the part where it is "on" 24/7/365, and if I don't use the heat, it accumulates. That is to say, as I load follow, whatever heat I don't use, stays in the ground and is available for me the next day, and the next, and the next. I get nearly 100% coverage and 100% capture of that energy, unlike solar. I never get curtailed. Secondly, I can collect this heat under existing infrastructure, meaning it has little to no surface footprint. Which is WHY the energy per square meter is even a relevant measurement tool - it is measuring your land use. Geothermal stations use 404 square meters of surface land per GW·h versus 1,335 square meters for a wind farm. heck, they use less land per GWh than a coal fired power plant.
"And those aren't cheap, running $4.8M/well for that Fervo plant."
Which is HALF the cost of a geothermal well five years ago. And with Fervo I need 1/3 the number of wells (each well covers a larger area). And 0% chance of failure. Does that make sense? My new cost is $48 million for the wells versus $300 million. Fervo has cut the costs 80% and reduced the risk.
And FERVO is a FOIC price. The NOIC price is likely to be less. That is why the DOE is predicting a 90% reduction in cost for geothermal wells by 2030. We've already achieved most of that reduction. They think we can get down to $1-2 million per well.
I have no disagreement on shutting down San Onofre - stupid decision.
"And if they can build these Fervo plants anywhere, why didn't they build it in California close to the big load centers and save on the very high transmission costs, in addition to the 10 cents/kwh power? Plus additional federal & state subsidies. Why isn't Utah buying it instead?"
Well, Utah teamed with the DOE to build project FORGE - Frontier Research for Geothermal Energy. They picked an area near Milford Utah for experimentation. Fervo is new company. The first project is being built in conjunction with FORGE, hence it is located in Utah. Part of this is to get DOE blessing - the DOE is carefully watching every aspect of the project. And yes, the power from the first plant is going to Milford, Utah as well as California.
It's about as far from Milford Utah to Salt Lake City as it is Milford to California. They sold (most) of the energy to California. I assume because they bid more for it. The only other major demand center between the two is Las Vegas.
I expect Fervo will branch out from southern Utah, but I assume staying there, for now, is just to lower the risk even further of their first few builds. Like I said - project FORGE is why they are there at all.
Their other project, for the google data center, is in Nevada. It actually serves two data centers, one in Reno, and one in Las Vegas.
Anyhow, these things will start popping up closer to demand sources. But I expect the first several will be installed in Utah, Nevada, maybe in the Salton Sea area. Places where the geothermal flux is higher, and land is cheap.
Brilliant. Anecdote about electric cars from Monterrey, Mexico, Mexico's industrial capital, two hours from the US border. The grid here is terrible. We have electrical outages almost every week. Recharging an electric car reliably? Fuggedaboutit.
Tesla made a big announcement a couple of years ago that it will build a huge plant just west of Monterrey. Yeah, right. Maybe Senor Musk should invest in balloon transportation. At least he has the hot air to power that transportation alternative.
Voluntarily investing in decarbonization is symptomatic of a cognitive error by Google's management under which it mistakes the example of a "complex" physical system that is Earth's climate system for a "non-complex" physical system, where a "complex" physical system exhibits one or more "emergent properties each of which is a property of the whole system and not of the separate parts of this system whereas a "non-complex" physical system exhibits no such properties. This mistake is a precursor to the totalitarian rule that Google attempts to impose on Americans when it "Prohibits climate deniers from being able to monetize their content on its platforms via ads or creator payment."
Well, not to belabor the obvious, but unless every person working for Google plans on committing suicide, they're never, ever, ever, getting to 'net zero carbon'.
If CO2 emissions are increasing why for at least the last 8 years that ambient CO2 has remained at 430 ppm. Simply as emissions increase the rate of photosynthesis increases producing more food and greenery world wide.
Big tech has so much cash on hand they can easily afford to buy large and or small nuclear reactors outright - nice tax deductions in the process for them too right? All that accumulated IQ that work at those corporations and they still stall.
This would be a great project for Robert Bryce. He's done some fantastic work showing the money going to anti-industry NGOs and such. I wonder if he could figure out what is being spent to own the NRC and people it with apparatchiks hostile to nuclear.
We need one or more angel billionaires to throw money at breaking the regulators, until they, uh, well, break. Not necessarily throw the money at the regulators; it'd be more satisfying to throw it at folks who have the power to unemploy and disempower the regulators.
Yet... Wyoming banned nuclear power till 5 years ago. Now they are building a nuclear power plant.
A bill passed the Senate 88-2 and the House 393-13 this year, and was signed by Biden, "To streamline the licensing process, promote the reuse of existing infrastructure, and support the development of new nuclear facilities on previously used industrial sites, the NRC will be expected to evaluate and address regulatory issues for siting nuclear facilities at brownfield and retired fossil fuel sites."
The NRC will revise its mission statement within one year of enactment to include that “licensing and regulation of the civilian use of radioactive materials and nuclear energy be conducted in a manner that is efficient and does not unnecessarily limit the civilian use of radioactive materials and deployment of nuclear energy; or the benefits of civilian use of radioactive materials and nuclear energy technology to society.”
"Google is, at root, an industrial company that relies on massive digital foundries" [new name for data centers]- nice connection with steel foundries as energy consumers. 92% of search market! Wow - I didn't know it was that much - certainly sounds like a monopoly and violation of anti-trust laws.
Google, along with Apple and many tech companies, over whelming use voluntary carbon credit to make the claim of 100% renewables and these carbon credit have been proven to misrepresent their claims. Google in their SEC filing stated that while that claim to be 100% renewable they are still connect to the grid and as a result they take what is generated on the grid, which included coal, and given that we don't have a national grid-it's a patch work of different entities, operators, & generators-generation will be different at any time so there is no way you can choose the electricity you consume. Electricity is not a commodity-not primary energy-and really when you pay your utility bill it is for the delivery of primary energy in the form of electricity.
Climate change, climate crisis DO NOT EXIST!
I recently read the book "The Ecotechnic future" and the author predicts that we are entering a period of scarcity-industrialism. You can see that in the mining push for uneconomical rare earth extraction to support the tech industry. I suspect google will find themselves having difficulty in data-center-expansion in the future for this reason. Their increase in carbon footprint is partially expansion and partially that resources necessary for "environmentally friendly" options are beginning to run short.
Link to the book review if any one cares: https://alwaysthehorizon.substack.com/p/book-review-an-ecotechnic-future
Is all of this bad? These are stats. if the search and videos were divided among three or four companies do you think they would use less energy? If not then the challenge is to go pedal to the metal on SMR's and other energy. Otherwise, none of your impressive stats matter.
NASA on YouTube: CO2 is Greening the Earth !
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zOwHT8yS1XI&pp=ygUTbmFzYSBncmVlbmluZyBlYXJ0aA%3D%3D
In 2015, Google changed its corporate motto from "Don't be evil" to "Do the right thing (for Google)". They realized that the former was a lie and the new motto can keep the parenthetical silent to sound better.
Can't wait to hear about your Nantucket talk . . . Let's all recall the wonderful limerick,
There once was a man from Nantucket,
with a windmill that broke so he chucked it.
He said in the crash when he lost all his cash,
"Those green energy dudes can just suck it."
Well done!
Several salient points:
1) Back in 2007, Google had a simple idea for addressing global warming — we just need to take existing renewable-energy technologies and keep improving them until they were as cheap as fossil fuels. They started a lavishly funded a project called RE-C (renewable energy - carbon-based energy). They plowed millions of $ into the project, and to this day, are part owners of the Ivanpah solar project. In 2011 they gave up. Because they realized it wouldn't work - we could never make wind and solar cheap enough or plentiful enough to solve the problem. Again, they tried to solve the problem in 2011 and concluded the problem was unsolvable using wind and solar. And that there was no pathway to EVER solving the problem that way.
2) Computation is directly connected to energy. The more you compute, the more energy you will use. To put it another way, information requires the expenditure of energy to be created. They literally can't grow their business without using more energy.
3) The recent success of the Fervo energy project in Nevada is the first ray of hope for Google. It is possible for them to greatly supplement their energy sources using this method, and better yet, it can be used virtually anywhere they decide to locate a data center, and even co-located.
Their own researchers (Google's) told them wind/solar would never work, and Google ignore them.
https://www.theregister.com/2014/11/21/renewable_energy_simply_wont_work_google_renewables_engineers/
Your information is 20 years old.
The cost of geothermal is based on the cost to drill - the cost for the power plant is negligible. The cost to drill was based on the depth to hot temps. Hence the focus on geologically active areas. Geothermal systems move heat rather than generate it. It may have lower efficiency, but that is irrelevant, since it has a much, much lower operating cost. Horizontal drilling means that a single geothermal power plant can collect heat over a much wider area. They drill vertical wells several hundred meters apart and connect them underground through horizontal drilling. This lets them move fluid along a larger segment of rock underground, producing more steam and making the wells far more efficient.
The DOE and MIT think they can reduce the cost of geothermal by 90%. The google plant is 115 MW. It is online, now. You can see it, measure its output, everything. They also just broke ground on a 400 MW plant in Utah
https://fervoenergy.com/fervo-energy-breaks-ground-on-the-worlds-largest-next-gen-geothermal-project/
Do I think you can power the world with geothermal? No. Do I think you could power Nevada? yes. Do I think you could supplement a large fraction of Google's data center energy use? Yes.
Drilling technology has taken a massive leap in ability and quality since around 2010.
I'm saying your knowledge of DRILLING is 20 years out of date. A "good heat source" is no longer required for geothermal - we can drill deeper and collect heat from a much wider area. Hence the massive cost improvements. Again, they have built/are building these systems right now. None of this is speculative.
The "nonstandard" stuff is BS - it is absolutely standardized and has been for about 10 years now.
https://www.ormat.com/en/projects/all/main/
190 power plants, 3.2 GW capacity, installed worldwide, by one company, most of it installed in the last 10 years. Again, you talk like someone stuck in 2010 or so.
The rest is utter nonsense. Yes, you select a good location to drill. How is that a drawback? In the olden days, we need to find a natural source of steam to exploit. Since you were exploiting this natural source, your extraction rate could not exceed the replenishment rate. You also suffered the vagrancies of what was happening in the subsurface. That said, the first geothermal power plant ever built, built in 1904 in Italy, is still making power.
Stop thinking you understand something you clearly don't. Read up on where we are TODAY, not stuff from 10-20 years ago.
As to Fervo - "Funny California doesn't want to reveal the cost of the PPAs they have with Fervo." I assume you mean the 320 MW contract Southern California Edison signed with Fervo in June 28? It's 15-year agreement for 24/7 carbon-free geothermal energy, California PUC unanimously approved the deal. The price is just under $100 per megawatt-hour, compared to $23 per MWh for intermittent solar and $43 per MWh for a combined-cycle gas plant. They charge more because it is worth more, being fully dispatchable. Took me all of 5 minutes to find the cost of this "secret" number, in the pages of the LA Times no less. Sheesh.
"Steam plant is still more expensive than conventional steam plants. "
The power plant for geothermal is not more expensive than the steam plant for conventional power plants - where in the world did you hear that? If anything, it is cheaper, since it usually operating at lower temps and pressures. Flash steam plants, at $2,500/kwh installed. Binary plants are maybe $3,000/kwh. The tech for binary plants has been around since the 1980s.
Drilling is over half the costs for geothermal power, and a single well can cost $10 million, with a 20% risk of failure. For a large power plant, I might drill 30 wells. That has been the problem. $600 million with a 20% chance of losing $300 million of my investment.
"What part of average geothermal heat flux is 10,000X lower than even the meager 1000w/sq. m. solar heat flux, do you have trouble understanding."
Well, the part where it is "on" 24/7/365, and if I don't use the heat, it accumulates. That is to say, as I load follow, whatever heat I don't use, stays in the ground and is available for me the next day, and the next, and the next. I get nearly 100% coverage and 100% capture of that energy, unlike solar. I never get curtailed. Secondly, I can collect this heat under existing infrastructure, meaning it has little to no surface footprint. Which is WHY the energy per square meter is even a relevant measurement tool - it is measuring your land use. Geothermal stations use 404 square meters of surface land per GW·h versus 1,335 square meters for a wind farm. heck, they use less land per GWh than a coal fired power plant.
"And those aren't cheap, running $4.8M/well for that Fervo plant."
Which is HALF the cost of a geothermal well five years ago. And with Fervo I need 1/3 the number of wells (each well covers a larger area). And 0% chance of failure. Does that make sense? My new cost is $48 million for the wells versus $300 million. Fervo has cut the costs 80% and reduced the risk.
And FERVO is a FOIC price. The NOIC price is likely to be less. That is why the DOE is predicting a 90% reduction in cost for geothermal wells by 2030. We've already achieved most of that reduction. They think we can get down to $1-2 million per well.
I have no disagreement on shutting down San Onofre - stupid decision.
"And if they can build these Fervo plants anywhere, why didn't they build it in California close to the big load centers and save on the very high transmission costs, in addition to the 10 cents/kwh power? Plus additional federal & state subsidies. Why isn't Utah buying it instead?"
Well, Utah teamed with the DOE to build project FORGE - Frontier Research for Geothermal Energy. They picked an area near Milford Utah for experimentation. Fervo is new company. The first project is being built in conjunction with FORGE, hence it is located in Utah. Part of this is to get DOE blessing - the DOE is carefully watching every aspect of the project. And yes, the power from the first plant is going to Milford, Utah as well as California.
It's about as far from Milford Utah to Salt Lake City as it is Milford to California. They sold (most) of the energy to California. I assume because they bid more for it. The only other major demand center between the two is Las Vegas.
I expect Fervo will branch out from southern Utah, but I assume staying there, for now, is just to lower the risk even further of their first few builds. Like I said - project FORGE is why they are there at all.
Their other project, for the google data center, is in Nevada. It actually serves two data centers, one in Reno, and one in Las Vegas.
Anyhow, these things will start popping up closer to demand sources. But I expect the first several will be installed in Utah, Nevada, maybe in the Salton Sea area. Places where the geothermal flux is higher, and land is cheap.
Brilliant. Anecdote about electric cars from Monterrey, Mexico, Mexico's industrial capital, two hours from the US border. The grid here is terrible. We have electrical outages almost every week. Recharging an electric car reliably? Fuggedaboutit.
Tesla made a big announcement a couple of years ago that it will build a huge plant just west of Monterrey. Yeah, right. Maybe Senor Musk should invest in balloon transportation. At least he has the hot air to power that transportation alternative.
Voluntarily investing in decarbonization is symptomatic of a cognitive error by Google's management under which it mistakes the example of a "complex" physical system that is Earth's climate system for a "non-complex" physical system, where a "complex" physical system exhibits one or more "emergent properties each of which is a property of the whole system and not of the separate parts of this system whereas a "non-complex" physical system exhibits no such properties. This mistake is a precursor to the totalitarian rule that Google attempts to impose on Americans when it "Prohibits climate deniers from being able to monetize their content on its platforms via ads or creator payment."
Well, not to belabor the obvious, but unless every person working for Google plans on committing suicide, they're never, ever, ever, getting to 'net zero carbon'.
If CO2 emissions are increasing why for at least the last 8 years that ambient CO2 has remained at 430 ppm. Simply as emissions increase the rate of photosynthesis increases producing more food and greenery world wide.
Big tech has so much cash on hand they can easily afford to buy large and or small nuclear reactors outright - nice tax deductions in the process for them too right? All that accumulated IQ that work at those corporations and they still stall.
Heh, how much does it cost to own the NRC?
This would be a great project for Robert Bryce. He's done some fantastic work showing the money going to anti-industry NGOs and such. I wonder if he could figure out what is being spent to own the NRC and people it with apparatchiks hostile to nuclear.
We need one or more angel billionaires to throw money at breaking the regulators, until they, uh, well, break. Not necessarily throw the money at the regulators; it'd be more satisfying to throw it at folks who have the power to unemploy and disempower the regulators.
Yet... Wyoming banned nuclear power till 5 years ago. Now they are building a nuclear power plant.
A bill passed the Senate 88-2 and the House 393-13 this year, and was signed by Biden, "To streamline the licensing process, promote the reuse of existing infrastructure, and support the development of new nuclear facilities on previously used industrial sites, the NRC will be expected to evaluate and address regulatory issues for siting nuclear facilities at brownfield and retired fossil fuel sites."
The NRC will revise its mission statement within one year of enactment to include that “licensing and regulation of the civilian use of radioactive materials and nuclear energy be conducted in a manner that is efficient and does not unnecessarily limit the civilian use of radioactive materials and deployment of nuclear energy; or the benefits of civilian use of radioactive materials and nuclear energy technology to society.”
https://www.powermag.com/the-advance-act-legislation-crucial-for-a-u-s-nuclear-renaissance-clears-congress-heres-a-detailed-breakdown/
Things CAN change, and quickly.
Net zero for thee, but not for me.
"Google is, at root, an industrial company that relies on massive digital foundries" [new name for data centers]- nice connection with steel foundries as energy consumers. 92% of search market! Wow - I didn't know it was that much - certainly sounds like a monopoly and violation of anti-trust laws.
Google, along with Apple and many tech companies, over whelming use voluntary carbon credit to make the claim of 100% renewables and these carbon credit have been proven to misrepresent their claims. Google in their SEC filing stated that while that claim to be 100% renewable they are still connect to the grid and as a result they take what is generated on the grid, which included coal, and given that we don't have a national grid-it's a patch work of different entities, operators, & generators-generation will be different at any time so there is no way you can choose the electricity you consume. Electricity is not a commodity-not primary energy-and really when you pay your utility bill it is for the delivery of primary energy in the form of electricity.
I’m sure you’re in a Nantucket to speak of a Dodo technology.