• doodledup@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Sorry I was a little wrong. Apparently 100% of Googles annual electricity consumption is matched with renewable energy that is supplied back to the grid. So basically, at night when there is no sun they use power from the grid and during the day they compensate it with excess renewable energy production.

    It’s not 100% carbon neutral. But it doesn’t sound that bad either. There is worse things than that.

    • exanime@lemmy.today
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      5 months ago

      Sorry I was a little wrong. Apparently 100% of Googles annual electricity consumption is matched with renewable energy that is supplied back to the grid

      Not even… what they do is “pay” someone for renewable energy (not the energy they consume, nor do they produce energy on solar panels or anything renewable to go back into the grid)

      This is their own statement: “In 2022 – for the sixth consecutive year – Google matched 100 percent of its global annual electricity consumption with purchases of renewable energy” (source)[https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/cleanenergy/]

      And even that is not true since their actual report says that in 2021 they barely made it to 66%

      Globally, 66% of the electricity use at Google data centers was matched with carbon- free energy on an hourly basis, 5% higher in 2019 but 1% lower in 2020. We expected this fluctuation: in 2020, we brought a large number of CFE projects online, leading to a large jump in our 2020 CFE % and thus a high baseline for calculating changes between 2020 and 2021 (source)[https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/2021-carbon-free-energy-data-centers.pdf]

      So, in a nutshell… they are throwing some money at it and pretending they are not polluting anymore.

      It’s not 100% carbon neutral.

      Google declared itself carbon neutral (whatever they think that means) back in 2007

      There is worse things than that.

      this is literally the lowest bar to clear

      • doodledup@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Purchasing and producing renewable energy is the same thing. If you purchase it, somebody else is producing it for you.

        • exanime@lemmy.today
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          5 months ago

          But they are not even using said energy themselves… that is like throwing my garbage right on the street but paying someone in India to pick some garbage over there (for at lot less)… if you are my neighbour, would you think it’s fine?

          I don’t need google “producing” clean energy… I want them CONSUMING clean energy… as it is, they are pollution just as much as ever (more every year) but they pretend to be clean by throwing money at it… at the end of the day, the planet keeps getting polluted and the climate nicely on its way to cooking us alive