Google announced Thursday it has signed 18 new energy agreements in wind and solar, representing 1,600 megawatts (MW) in total, to continue to fully offset its annual electricity consumption with renewable energy.
"Once all of these projects are completed, our carbon-free portfolio will produce as much electricity as a city like Washington DC or countries like Uruguay or Lithuania," says Sundar Pichai, head of technology giant, in a statement.
The new projects include investments in the United States, Chile and Europe and will include the construction of millions of solar panels and wind turbines. They allow Google to increase its portfolio of agreements in wind and solar energy by more than 40% to 5,500 MW.
The first private buyer in renewable energies
"Since 2017, we are the first company of our size to fully offset its annual electricity consumption with renewable energy," says Sundar Pichai. "As a result, we have become the largest private buyer of renewable energy in the world," he says. The search engine must in particular feed its data centers ("data center"), infrastructures that consume a lot of energy because the servers constantly need to be cooled.
In 2018, according to Gartner, Google ranked fourth among cloud providers (remote computing) with a 4% market share, far behind Amazon (47.8%), Microsoft (15%), 5%) and Alibaba (7.7%), but its service recorded revenue up 60% year-on-year.