Article published February 11, 2015
Google announced today that they will buy and use wind energy from the Altamont Pass in California, which is a wind farm between the Bay Area and Central Valley. This purchase comes with a 20-year power agreement with the company that owns the farm.
Their goal is, by 2016, to use 50 percent of the wind farm's power to produce the 43 megawatts necessary to keep the entirety of their campus in Mountain View, California running. Within the agreement was a term that stated the wind farm should replace 370 of their turbines from the 1980s with 24 newer, bigger machines that produce more energy. Fewer turbines also means less death of the birds that fly around the wind farm.
David Radcliffe, the Vice President of real estate and workplaces services, said, "We think this project is especially cool because back in the 1980s, the golden hills of Altamont Pass were an early test bed for the first large-scale wind power technology in the U.S. We've been blown away (pun intended :)) by how far turbine technology has come since then."
Google has always been ahead of the game when it comes to being green. In 2007, they agreed to be carbon-neutral. They already use as much clean energy as possible to keep their data centers running.
The announcement follows Apple's revelation that they will buy power and help build a giant, 280-megawatt solar farm in Monterey County to power their Cupertino headquarters and all Apple stores in California.
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