Climate tools for Copenhagen and beyond

Representatives from around the world arrived in Copenhagen, Denmark today to negotiate a successor treaty for the Kyoto Protocol. This 15th Conference of Parties (COP15) has been called the most important conference in a decade.

In fact, in an unprecedented initiative, 56 major newspapers in 45 countries published a shared editorial calling on politicians and negotiators gathering in Copenhagen to strike an ambitious deal on combating climate change. The editorial appeared in 20 languages including Chinese, Russian and Arabic. It asserts that the Copenhagen summit has the power "to shape history’s judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it."

So in honor of this important event, we've built a number of new tools to give delegates — and you at home — easy access to useful information to help visualize and explore data and issues relating to climate change.

In September we launched a series of new Google Earth climate change layers and tours in collaboration with the Danish government. Check out these tours to explore the effects of climate change and get a better understanding of the scenarios that could unfold if we don't stop this environmental threat. The tours were developed together with leading environmental organizations and individuals including The World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace as well as Al Gore, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and others.


Over the past weeks, many of you have already uploaded personal statements of your hopes (and fears) for our planet through YouTube and the Raise Your Voice campaign. Now the search is on for the best video and text questions to be delivered to global leaders and climate activists who will come together in Copenhagen to answer the top-ranked questions from the YouTube channel in a townhall produced by CNN International. Voting with Google Moderator will continue until December 14th.


An Australia-based Googler also recently launched a tool called Show your Vote which puts the supporting voices for a global deal right on a Google Map. This tool can be integrated into any website to help drive the outreach and collect votes, and can already be found on UNFCCC, COP15.dk and WWF Earth Hour.

And if you're in Denmark with us, check out two unique installations powered by Google and YouTube. The first, a giant CO2 CUBE, is an art installation that visualizes one metric ton of carbon dioxide and has YouTube videos streaming on its walls. The second is an interactive Google Earth simulator made up of flat-screen panels and controlled with a free roam Space Navigator 6-axis joystick. (It's cool, trust us.) Welcome to Copenhagen!

Posted by Jonas Vang, Sr. Industry Analyst and Benjamin Kott, Green Business Operations

Connect with world leaders on the climate debate

(Cross-posted from the Official YouTube Blog)

Next week 192 countries will participate in the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen — the first step in setting new international commitments for carbon reduction. We want to be sure your voice is included in the debate.

That's why, starting today, you can submit and vote on questions to ask world climate leaders during a televised town hall on CNN. With Google Moderator on YouTube for the first time, you can view, add and vote on video or text questions in one spot.


Questions will be translated into numerous languages using the Google Language API, giving you a chance to read and vote on text questions from around the world. Voting and submissions will be accepted until December 14. You can also track the conversation and vote on new questions. Visit www.youtube.com/cop15 now to get started.

Next week we'll post an update on popular and interesting questions. We're looking forward to seeing what ideas you and others around the world have for addressing climate change.

Posted by Steve Grove, Head of YouTube News & Politics and Colby Ranger, Tech Lead, Google Moderator

Show Your Vote for COP15

(Cross-posted from the Google Australia Blog) 

One of the benefits working at Google is the ability to spend 20% of your time on projects you are passionate about. Recently I was lucky enough to attend the Australian Conservation Foundation's Climate Project Summit, where I met Al Gore, and was trained as a Climate Project Presenter. This led me to devote my 20% time to develop Show Your Vote. Built as an open-source platform, Show Your Vote enables people around the world to tell the world's leaders to seal a fair and effective deal for climate change.

Some major environmental campaigns (including Earth Hour) as well as UNFCC, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, are now using Show Your Vote to help visualize public support of next week's COP 15, the Climate Change Conference taking place in Copenhagen.

No matter where you are in the world, see all the ways in which you can engage in the COP15 on this Virtual participation in COP15 page.

One of the big challenges in activating people on the issue of climate change is that there are a myriad of campaigns - big ones, small and local ones - taking place all over the world. I really wanted to provide a single platform that all campaigns and websites can use to collectively show the vote. So I developed a "web element" similar in function to Google Web Elements, which anyone can insert into a site so that people can vote and see the collective vote. They can also get educational tools on their own website by simply filling out the publisher form, and copying and pasting a single line of HTML code.

Google App Engine provides the hosting solution that makes this all possible. And I'd like to thank fellow Googlers Pamela Fox, Bob Aman, Rupert Breheny and Benjamin Kott for volunteering their time to make Show Your Vote possible.

Show Your Vote has three tabs: Vote, Explore, and Learn. The Vote tab allows individuals and organizations to show their vote.

The Explore tab displays individual votes aggregated by post code, and organizations by their own custom icons. The voting map is powered by the Google Maps API. Additionally, social networking tools powered by Google Friend Connect help people within the global community to share their messages of support. Individual votes are aggregated into postal codes, and organizations can upload their own icon to the map.

Finally, the Learn tab contains rich educational pieces, narrated by some of the top names in science, NGOs and the political world. These tours were created by the Google Earth Outreach team using Google Earth's new touring capabilities.

In the countdown to COP15, I'm hoping that we can collect enough of a global public show of support to amplify the need to change climate change, drive collective action, and reinforce the need for our world leaders to act now. Please join me in helping to show the vote!

Posted by Justin Baird, Innovationist, Google Australia

Energy Secretary Chu visits Googleplex

Secretary of Energy Dr. Steven Chu joined us at the Google campus today to talk about how the U.S. can build a prosperous economy powered by clean energy.

During a fireside chat with Googlers and our CEO Eric Schmidt, Secretary Chu talked about what it will take to create a clean energy revolution. When it comes to clean tech investments, he said, the Department of Energy is trying to "hit home runs, not base hits." He noted that there are many proposed solutions to climate change out there, and we need to pursue all of them. "The scale of what we need to do is enormous," said Secretary Chu, and "putting the world on a carbon diet" and dramatically bringing down the cost of clean energy and should be top priorities. If we succeed, it will "drive a new industrial revolution." 

You can watch the full video of his talk here:

Secretary Chu also heard from Googlers about some of our own clean energy projects including Google PowerMeter, which gives consumers access to their energy use information, developing renewable energy that is cheaper than coal (RE<C) and making our datacenters the most energy efficient in the world. "More companies need to get on board and make this part of their business plan," said the Secretary.

While in Mountain View, Secretary Chu announced $151 million in funding for 37 breakthrough energy projects in technologies like renewable power, energy efficiency and electric cars. The funding is being made available through the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), a newly-launched organization within the Department of Energy (DOE) created to support high-risk, high-reward research into innovative energy technologies. ARPA-E is modeled on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the agency that funded research that eventually led to the creation of the Internet.

Update on 10/29: Updated to include the full video of Secretary Chu's talk.

Posted by Michael Terrell, Energy Policy Counsel

A green tour of the Google campus

We care about a clean energy future and that's a commitment that starts at home. In honor of Blog Action Day 2009 and this year's climate change theme, we wanted to walk you through some of the green features of our global headquarters here in sunny Mountain View, California.

• Getting to work: We've got a shuttle service that brings employees from around the Bay Area to the Googleplex every day. These shuttles are outfitted with wi-fi and fueled by B20 biodiesel. And employees who bike, walk, skip, hop or otherwise self-power to work can earn points that translate into a donation from Google to their charity of choice.

• Turning on the lights: The rooftops at our headquarters are covered in 9,212 photovoltaic solar panels that produce 1.6 MW of electricity — enough energy to power about 1,000 California homes.

• Healthy buildings: The facilities at our main campus use sustainable building materials that are environmentally friendly and healthier, such as "cradle-to-cradle" certified products designed to never end up in landfills, fresh air ventilation, daylighting, and whenever possible, PVC- and formaldehyde-free materials.

• No, we're not kidding: We've been known to use goats instead of lawn mowers to graze the fields surrounding our campus.

• Getting around town: We have a fleet of 8 plug-in vehicles that Google employees can use free of charge to run errands during the day. (In the summer of 2008 our Google.org RechargeIT initiative launched a controlled driving experiment, and our plug-in hybrids achieved more than 90 MPG!) Shared bicycles are also scattered among our buildings for Googlers to use for short trips around campus, reducing the need for cars during the work day.

• Waste not, want not: Waste from our Mountain View cafes is separated and the organic component is composted. As a result, we've reduced waste sent to landfills, reduced greenhouse gases and recycled nutrients leading to improved soil quality without chemicals. And any disposable plateware and cutlery we continue to use in the cafés is now compostable.

Check out this website to learn more about Google's green initiatives, and thank you to Blog Action Day for orchestrating the " largest-ever social change event on the web" yet again.

Posted by Anthony Ravitz, Real Estate & Workplace Services

Google PowerMeter's first device partner

Today, we're very excited to announce we have secured our first official device partner. (That means having a smart meter installed by your utility is no longer a prerequisite for using Google PowerMeter!) For the last several months, a few hundred Google employees have been testing a number of in-home electricity monitoring devices. Those of us lucky enough to have one of these devices installed in our homes experienced first-hand how access to high-resolution energy use information drives meaningful behavior change (PDF). So we set out to make that data easier for everyone to access and understand by sending the collected data to our Google PowerMeter software.

The TED 5000 from Energy Inc. is an energy monitor that measures electricity usage in real-time (TED stands for "The Energy Detective"). As of today, we're pleased to announce that anyone in North America can purchase and install the TED 5000 and see personal home energy data using our free software tool, Google PowerMeter, from anywhere you can access the web including through iGoogle for mobile phones. (If you already have a TED 5000, you can download a free firmware upgrade to enable this functionality.)

Combined with Google PowerMeter, the TED 5000 device can help you understand your electricity usage to save energy and money. Energy Inc. is just our first device partner and if you are working for a company that manufactures energy monitors, we'd like to hear from you. Stay tuned for more!

Posted by Tom Sly, New Business Development & Charles Spirakis, Software Engineer

Google climate change tools for COP15

In December of this year, representatives from nations around the globe will gather in Copenhagen to discuss a global agreement on climate change. The objective is to reduce global warming emissions sufficiently in order to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change and to support the global community in adapting to the unavoidable changes ahead. Denmark will act as host for this fifteenth Conference of the Parties under the United Nations’ Climate Change Convention, known as COP15.

In collaboration with the Danish government and others, we are launching a series of Google Earth layers and tours to allow you to explore the potential impacts of climate change on our planet and the solutions for managing it. Working with data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we show on Google Earth the range of expected temperature and precipitation changes under different global emissions scenarios that could occur throughout the century. Today we are unveiling our first climate tour on Google Earth: "Confronting Climate Change," with narration by Al Gore. Stay tuned for more tours in the coming weeks!

Together with the Danish government, we're also launching our YouTube COP15 channel. On the channel, you can submit your thoughts and questions on climate change to decision-makers and the world through an initiative called "Raise Your Voice." These videos will be broadcast on screens around the conference in December and rated by viewers of the channel. The top-rated contributions will be aired globally during the COP15 CNN/YouTube debate on December 15th, and the top two submissions will win a trip to Copenhagen. We look forward to seeing your videos!

Posted by Benjamin Kott, Green Business Operations and Jonas Vang, Industry Analyst

Should you spring clean your solar panels?

Ever since we assembled a 1.6 MW solar panel installation at our headquarters in Mountain View in 2007, we've been wondering, "Does cleaning the solar panels make them more effective?" We thought it might, but we needed to be sure. So we analyzed the mountains of data that we collect about the energy that these panels produce — after rain, after cleaning and at different times of the year.

We have two different sets of solar panels on our campus — completely flat ones installed on carports, and rooftop ones that are tilted.

Since the carport solar panels have no tilt, rain doesn't do a good job of rinsing off the dirt they collect. (Also, our carports are situated across from a sand field, which doesn't help the situation.) We cleaned these panels for the first time after they had been in operation for 15 months, and their energy output doubled overnight. When we cleaned them again eight months later, their output instantly increased by 36 percent. In fact, we found that cleaning these panels is the #1 way to maximize the energy they produce. As a result, we've added the carport solar panels to our spring cleaning checklist.

The rooftop solar panels are a different story. Our data indicates that rain does a sufficient job of cleaning the tilted solar panels. Some dirt does accumulate in the corners, but the resulting reduction in energy output is fairly small — and cleaning tilted panels does not significantly increase their energy production. So for now, we'll let Mother Nature take care of cleaning our rooftop panels.

Accumulated dirt in the corners of a rooftop solar panel

We've also been crunching numbers on dollars-and-cents; the more energy our panels produce, the sooner we'll be paid back by our solar investment. Our analysis now predicts that Google's system will pay for itself in about six and a half years, which is even better than we initially expected.

If you want to learn more about our solar study, check out these slides showing the effects that seasonality, tilt, dirt, particulate matter, rain and cleaning have on Google's solar energy output. We hope you solar panel owners out there can tailor our analysis to the specifics of your own installation to produce some extra energy of your own!

Posted by Winnie Lam, Senior Product Manager

Energized about our first Google PowerMeter partners

Earlier this year I blogged about energy information and a tool our engineers developed called Google PowerMeter, a Google gadget that can show consumers their personal electricity consumption right on a home computer. Our software relies on "smart meters" (or other metering devices) as a data source. Over the past several months we've been looking to partner with utilities that are installing (or have already installed) this equipment in their customers' homes. We're energized by our very first Google PowerMeter partners:

• San Diego Gas & Electric® (California)
  
• TXU Energy (Texas)
• JEA (Florida)
• Reliance Energy (India)
• Wisconsin Public Service Corporation (Wisconsin)
• White River Valley Electric Cooperative (Missouri)
• Toronto Hydro–Electric System Limited (Canada)
• Glasgow EPB (Kentucky)

Our initial partners include utilities with millions of customers as well as smaller ones. They are rural and urban, privately held and municipally run. Some are in the United States, others in Canada and India. They all have one thing in common — a desire to serve their customers by providing access to detailed information that helps save energy and money. For now, Google PowerMeter is only available to a limited group of customers, but we plan to expand our roll out later this year. Our utility partners are leading the charge to make the electricity grid smarter and we look forward to working with them and others.

In addition to utilities, we're also seeking partnerships with companies that can enable the implementation of our software. Our first such partner is Itron, a leading meter and data management company that serves over 8,000 utilities and is helping some of their customers, including San Diego Gas & Electric, integrate with Google PowerMeter. If you're a utility or company with a smart meter project that might be interested in plugging in to our efforts, visit our website for more information.

Posted by Ed Lu, Engineering team

Energy and the Internet

There's been a lot of debate lately about the growing amount of energy needed to power the Internet, and we wanted to weigh in on the discussion. A few months ago, I first blogged about the about amount of energy used in one Google search. Our engineers crunched the numbers and found that an average query uses about 1 kJ of energy and emits about 0.2 grams of carbon dioxide. But those raw numbers don't really put the environmental impact of searching the Internet into perspective. To add some context, below is data about the C02 impact of some everyday activities and items compared to Google searching:

Activity	Google Searches
CO2 emissions of an average daily newspaper (PDF) (100% recycled paper)	850
A glass of orange juice	1,050
One load of dishes in an EnergyStar dishwasher (PDF)	5,100
A five mile trip in the average U.S. automobile	10,000
A cheeseburger	15,000
Electricity consumed by the average U.S. household in one month	3,100,000

We work hard to provide our users with the fastest products using the least amount of energy. We have a team of dedicated engineers focused on designing and building the most efficient data centers in the world. In fact, through efficiency innovations, we have managed to cut energy usage in our data centers by over 50 percent, so we're using less than half the energy to run our data centers as the industry average. This efficiency means that in the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will likely use more energy than we will use to answer your query.

And the energy used by computers is growing; people are more plugged-in today than ever before in history. There are more than one billion PCs and laptops currently in use, and that number is expected to grow to four billion by 2020. We've got cell phones, PDAs, iPods, and GPS devices — not to mention the data centers that store all of our digital information "in the cloud." The electricity needed to run all of our computers, gadgets, and gizmos is growing and now accounts for half of all ICT emissions. (ICT stands for "information and communications technology.")

Although the amount of energy used to power ICT is growing, it's important to measure all of the ways information technology helps us save energy too. A study by The Climate Group, in fact, shows that ICT emissions pay for themselves (PDF) (and then some) by enabling significant reductions in emissions by other sectors of the economy. After all, it's much more efficient to move electrons than to move atoms. "Virtual" tools like email, video-conferencing, and search engines replace more carbon-intensive activities like snail mail, business travel, and driving.

We can still make progress at improving computing efficiency across the industry, however, and Google is committed to doing so. In 2007 we co-founded the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, a non-profit organization committed to reducing global CO2 emissions from the operation of computers by 54 million tons a year by 2010. Check out their website for more information on how you can reduce the environmental impact of your own computer use.

Update 7/16/09: Google's Q2 2009 data center efficiency measurements are now available here. 

Posted by Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations

The power of video

We recently announced the winners of the Climate Savers Computing Initiative (CSCI) Power Down for the Planet video contest. In March, we challenged you to create videos to educate, entertain, and inform others about the importance of energy efficient computing and you did not disappoint. The submissions made us laugh (a lot) and almost cry (okay, just a little). Not only are these videos really creative, but also they help promote a smarter, greener computing future.

The global grand prize, $5000 cash and laptops, went to a team from Southern California for their entry "Power Down: One Computer at a Time." Students from the 19 participating colleges and universities were also eligible to win the student grand prize. This award goes to a team from Jackson State University for their "Power Down the Planet" entry. They will take home $5,000, 2009 Specialized Globe Vienna Deluxe 1 bikes powered by Specialized, and software. To all the winners, congratulations!

Check out a playlist of some of our favorite video entries:



Posted by Alice Ryan, Green Rocket Scientist

Reducing our carbon footprint

In June 2007 Google made a voluntary commitment to become carbon neutral. To honor this commitment, we calculated our global carbon footprint, purchased high-quality carbon offsets, and worked with a third party to certify our calculations and validate our offset portfolio. Through this process, we've neutralized all of Google's 2007 emissions, as well as part of our 2008 emissions. We'll continue to invest in offset projects until we reach carbon neutrality.

Offsets are only a small part of what we are doing to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. While offsets with strong additionality can achieve real emissions reductions in unregulated sectors at a relatively low cost, we view them as a short-term solution for Google, not as a substitute for other action. They provide a way for us to take responsibility for our emissions now, while we continue to advocate the development of utility-scale renewable energy. Current standards for offsets require a significant amount of work to evaluate the quality of each offset project and ensure that projects go beyond "business as usual." Stronger additionality standards -- that are more stringent, clear, and objective -- would also make it simpler for corporations like Google to use offsets as part of an overall strategy to neutralize emissions.

While we do plan to continue with the purchase of offsets to neutralize the emissions we cannot eliminate through efficiency or renewable energy, our green team will focus on what we do best -- engineering technology solutions. We've seen the success of transportation and IT efficiency programs like RechargeIT and the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, and the potential of renewable power and energy information initiatives such as RE<C and Google PowerMeter.

The best way to reduce our corporate footprint is to not use electricity in the first place. Google will continue to reduce our emissions directly by building and designing some of the world's most efficient data centers as well as using on-site renewable energy to power our facilities. Over the last five years, we have eliminated over half the emissions we would have produced in the absence of these critical measures. Offsets serve to neutralize the rest. In the future, we will continue to drive for improvements in energy efficiency and to find affordable sources of renewable energy.

Posted by Bill Weihl, Green Energy Czar

Happy Earth Day, Earthlings

Googlers around the world are celebrating Earth Day today by participating in events from green-themed film screenings in Singapore and Hyderabad, to a local food event in Kirkland, WA and Bike to Work Day in London. At our Mountain View campus, we're holding an environmental fair and hosting talks all week long as part of our Green@Google speaker series.

We're also giving employees in most of our offices around the world next-generation, super-efficient LED light bulbs to encourage energy efficiency. (LEDs use up to 90% less energy than incandescent bulbs and 50% less energy than a CFL.) In the average U.S. home, lighting accounts for about 20% of the electricity bill. If every Googler changes out one incandescent light bulb for one of these LEDs, the combined impact would be the equivalent of taking over 4,000 cars off the road for one year!

Of course, installing efficient light bulbs is just one way to cut down on energy consumption and costs. Just in time for Earth Day, the Climate Savers Computing Initiative's Power Down for the Planet pledge campaign aimed at colleges and universities wrapped up last week. More than 17,000 students took the pledge to support more efficient computing. The University of Maine at Farmington won the challenge, beating out 18 other schools with more than 24% of their campus community taking the pledge. You too can help save energy by enabling power management on your computer and buying more efficient computers.

As you take a moment today to think about how you can make our lovely patch of blue and green a little more healthy, we encourage you to explore a special gallery of Google Earth layers we compiled to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth's environment. With the power of Google Earth, we have the ability to visualize geo-spatial information and help us better understand the true impact humankind has on the planet. For example, you can visualize the changes in glaciers over the years, rising sea levels and climatic change and rising temperature from the feature KMLs in our Gallery.

Like others have said before us, we like to think that every day is Earth Day. But on this 39th anniversary of the official Earth Day, we're showing Mother Earth a little extra love and care, and hope that you'll be doing the same.

Posted by Lacy Caruthers, Green Business and Operations Strategy

Designing lean, green, energy-saving machines

Last week Google hosted a Data Center Efficiency Summit, bringing together approximately 160 industry leaders to share insights and best practices. Since it was April Fool's Day, we threw in a few jokes to keep the atmosphere fun (oil-cooled data center, anyone?), but the topic is serious: How can the IT industry keep growing while also exercising good environmental stewardship?

We disclosed for the first time details about the design of our ultra-efficient data centers. We also provided a first-ever video tour of a Google container data center as well as a water treatment facility. We detailed how we measure data center efficiency and discussed how we reduced our facility energy use by up to 85%. The engineers who developed our efficient battery backup solution even brought an actual Google server to the event.

By the end of the day, we narrowed in on a recurring theme: Reducing resource use through efficiency efforts is not just good for the environment, it saves money too. And it is this economic advantage which makes efficient data centers not just green, but truly sustainable.

For a tour of a Google container data center check out the video below or watch the entire summit: part 1, part 2, and part 3.



Posted by Jimmy Clidaras, Principal Engineer

An hour for the Earth

Cities around the world will participate in Earth Hour on Saturday, turning off their lights to raise awareness for energy conservation.

You might remember that last year we “turned the lights out” on the Google.com homepage during Earth Hour to symbolize our own commitment to sustainability. We won’t be turning out the lights on our homepage again this year. Our users come first, and while we received lots of enthusiastic feedback last year, some found an all-black Google.com to be a little confusing. (Also, darkened screens don’t actually save energy — modern displays use the same amount of power regardless of what they display.) We are actively supporting this year's Vote Earth, an Earth Hour 2009 initiative to gather one billion words to present at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December of this year. Participants can share their opinions about climate change through the Earth Connect social platform which incorporates Google tools including Google Maps, App Engine, Friend Connect, Google Translate, Blogger and Feedburner.

After all, Earth Hour is about more than dimming lights; it’s about making a commitment to reduce energy consumption throughout the year. At Google, we take this commitment seriously and over the past twelve months we’ve worked hard to reduce Google’s own power use and to help others reduce theirs:

• We remodeled our San Francisco office to achieve a Gold rating by the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED Green Building Rating System
• Our engineers are working on a tool called Google PowerMeter that will show consumers home energy information almost in real time, right on their computer
• We’ve designed the most efficient data centers possible and are sharing some of our best practices with industry peers
• In the fall we compiled tips and tricks to help our users save energy (and money)
• Our summit on plug-in vehicles in Washington was standing room only, with policy, technology, and energy experts all discussing an electric vehicle future
  

Google will continue to work hard this year to be as green as possible as a company, and we encourage others to take an hour on Saturday and commit to the Earth too. For some great ideas on ways you can save energy every hour of every day through computing efficiency, check out Climate Savers Computing Initiative and their recent video challenge: “Power Down for the Planet.”

Posted by Bill Weihl, Green Energy Czar

Pot O' (LEED) Gold

At Google, we strive to be green all year round, not just on St. Patrick's Day. We've been working hard to design our offices around the world to be as environmentally friendly as possible. We have a set of internal Workplace and Sustainability Design Guidelines which we use to ensure that we're providing healthy and productive workplaces for Googlers everywhere. In San Francisco, our office was recently rated Gold by the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Building Rating System. We're excited about this certification because it means we're on the right track with our approach to building environmentally sound offices.

Here are a few of the design strategies we implement to make our office buildings as green as possible. We thought they might even give you some ideas for greening your own home.

Reduce, reuse, recycle
We have frugal roots from our start-up days, so when we remodel an office, we reuse as many materials as possible. This strategy saves us money, and it avoids the environmental footprint associated not only with manufacturing and transporting new goods, but also with disposing of the old stuff. Construction and demolition waste makes up about 40% of the solid waste stream in the U.S. In the San Francisco office, we reused everything from partition walls and door assemblies to carpet and furniture left behind by the previous tenant. Plus, more than 64% of what we did throw away was recycled.

Healthy and sustainable
Sometimes, the simplest defense is the best defense, like the "Larry and Sergey Sniff Test": if it smells bad, it's probably bad for you (Larry and Sergey are a little busy to do all the sniffing themselves, so we help them out sometimes). The all-too-familiar new paint or new carpet smell is usually the sign of toxic VOCs (volatile organic compounds) off-gassing into the air we breathe. Of course, we have to go on more than just our noses, so we also rely on third-party certification programs (like Cradle to Cradle, Scientific Certification Systems, and those incorporated into LEED) and information from manufacturers to ensure that we use the healthiest products available. All the paints, sealants, adhesives, carpet, and furniture we purchased for the San Francisco office had the lowest possible levels of VOCs and formaldehyde, both of which have adverse effects on indoor air quality and long-term health. We also looked for sustainable materials that are locally manufactured, high in recycled content, and free of environmentally harmful materials like PVC.

Keeping it cool (or warm)
We make every effort to heat, cool and light our offices with the minimal amount of energy needed, and use building controls to ensure these systems are only on when we need them. Some of these strategies work everywhere, like installing motion sensors to control lighting and purchasing Energy Star-rated office equipment in the U.S. Other times, solutions are more site specific. In San Francisco, like many of our offices, we lease space in a building with many other tenants, which can often be an obstacle to implementing measures to save energy. We worked side by side with our landlord to retrofit the existing HVAC (heating, ventilation, air conditioning) system to make it more efficient. At our headquarters in Mountain View, we have a 1.6MW PV system, as well as a cutting-edge building management system that monitors and controls all of our energy use across campus (like PowerMeter, but with a few more bells and whistles).

Every drop counts
Water is one of our planet's most undervalued natural resources, and we're always looking for innovative and cost effective ways to use it more wisely. In San Francisco, as well as most of our other offices, we installed efficient faucets and flush valves in the bathrooms and kitchens. In locations where we have more green space like Mountain View, we use drought-resistant landscaping when possible. We just opened a new office in Sydney (which is undergoing Green Star certification through the Green Building Council of Australia), where waste water will be treated and recycled for toilet flushing and irrigation.

Location, location, location
If you visit the San Francisco office, you might not notice the low-VOC carpet, but you definitely won't miss the spectacular views of the San Francisco Bay and the Bay Bridge. Access to natural light and views increases Googler productivity and happiness, and decreases our energy costs by reducing the need for artificial lighting. Plus, like many of our offices, the San Francisco office is centrally located and easily accessible by public transit. We also provide preferred parking for carpools and vanpools, on-site bike storage, showers and changing facilities.

We've done a lot of work to be greener, but that doesn't mean we've reached the end of the rainbow and that pot of gold yet. We're constantly learning more about green building and ways to save energy. However, on this greenest of holidays, we're wearing the LEED certification of the San Francisco office as a badge of green pride -- a shamrock, you could say.

Posted by Anthony Ravitz, Real Estate and Workplace Services, and Lacy Caruthers, Green Business and Operations Strategy

Power down for the planet

Do you leave your fridge door open after grabbing what you need? Do you leave your vacuum cleaner running when you aren't cleaning? Of course not. The idea of doing either of these things sounds silly, yet many people don't think to turn off their computers after using them. By using power management tools on your computer and buying more efficient computers, you can save nearly half a ton of CO2 and more than $60 a year in personal energy costs.

To do our part, Google co-founded the Climate Savers Computing Initiative (CSCI) to promote a smarter, greener computing future. The simple changes above can have a HUGE collective impact; our goal is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 54 million tons per year by 2010 — the equivalent of taking 11 million cars off the road.

The biggest obstacle we face is not technological, it's awareness. That's why we're excited that CSCI has launched the Power Down for the Planet video contest, a challenge to you and your friends to develop original and creative videos that educate, entertain, and inform others about the importance of energy efficient computing.

So pick up a camera and make a video telling your own Climate Savers Computing story. How will the environment benefit from advances in computer power management? How do poor computing practices waste energy? What does a sustainable computing future look like to you? Let your imagination go wild.

Join us, gather some friends, and broadcast your vision of efficient computing. The team with the most compelling video can win up to $5,000 and energy efficient laptops; students at participating universities are also eligible to win $5,000 and Specialized Globe bicycles.

We can't wait to see what you create.



Posted by Bill Weihl, Green Energy Czar

Power to the people

Imagine how hard it would be to stick to a budget in a store with no prices. Well, that's pretty much how we buy electricity today. Your utility company sends you a bill at the end of the month with very few details. Most people don't know how much electricity their appliances use, where in the house they are wasting electricity, or how much the bill might go up during different seasons. But in a world where everyone had a detailed understanding of their home energy use, we could find all sorts of ways to save energy and lower electricity bills. In fact, studies show that access to home energy information results in savings between 5-15% on monthly electricity bills. It may not sound like much, but if half of America's households cut their energy demand by 10 percent, it would be the equivalent of taking eight million cars off the road.

Google’s mission is to "organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful," and we believe consumers have a right to detailed information about their home electricity use. We're tackling the challenge on several fronts, from policy advocacy to developing consumer tools, and even investing in smart grid companies. We've been participating in the dialogue in Washington, DC and with public agencies in the U.S. and other parts of the world to advocate for investment in the building of a "smart grid," to bring our 1950s-era electricity grid into the digital age. Specifically, to provide both consumers and utilities with real-time energy information, homes must be equipped with advanced energy meters called "smart meters." There are currently about 40 million smart meters in use worldwide, with plans to add another 100 million in the next few years.

But deploying smart meters alone isn't enough. This needs to be coupled with a strategy to provide customers with easy access to energy information. That's why we believe that open protocols and standards should serve as the cornerstone of smart grid projects, to spur innovation, drive competition, and bring more information to consumers as the smart grid evolves. We believe that detailed data on your personal energy use belongs to you, and should be available in an open standard, non-proprietary format. You should control who gets to see your data, and you should be free to choose from a wide range of services to help you understand it and benefit from it. For more details on our policy suggestions, check out the comments we filed yesterday with the California Public Utility Commission.

In addition to policy advocacy, we're building consumer tools, too. Over the last several months, our engineers have developed a software tool called Google PowerMeter, which will show consumers their home energy information almost in real time, right on their computer. Google PowerMeter is not yet available to the public since we're testing it out with Googlers first. But we're building partnerships with utilities and independent device manufacturers to gradually roll this out in pilot programs. Once we've had a chance to kick the tires, we'll make the tool more widely available.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to providing consumers with detailed energy information. And it will take the combined efforts of federal and state governments, utilities, device manufacturers, and software engineers to empower consumers to use electricity more wisely by giving them access to energy information.

Posted by Ed Lu, Engineering team

More computing, less power

In the fall we posted information about the efficiency of Google data centers and promised to update this information every quarter. We've now collected data for the fourth quarter of 2008 and published them to our sustainable computing website. Specifically, we're keeping track of the efficiency of any Google-designed data center with an IT load of at least 5 MW and a time-in-operation of at least 6 months. In Q4 our average power and cooling overhead in these facilities was 16%, bringing the overhead for the trailing 12 months to 19% (down from 21% a quarter earlier). For comparison, a recent EPA report put the overhead of the average enterprise data center at 100% or higher. We're very happy to have further improved our efficiency, and a number of factors contributed to that result.

First, efficiency is affected by seasonal weather patterns — cooler weather is better than hot weather, and several of our facilities benefited from that in Q4. Also, we continually review our efficiency metrics so that we notice, for example, that one of our data centers is not performing consistently with others of similar size and locale. So we'll take a closer look at optimizing that facility. Are we using fans to cool spaces that don't need to be cooled? Is the thermostat at the right set-point? Can we reduce the time the chillers need to run while keeping the machines operational? So we apply lessons we've learned from better-performing data centers to other facilities, and several such improvements took place in Q4. For the nitty-gritty technical details, visit our data center efficiency page.

While we've made a lot of progress in data center efficiency, we're still learning. As we continue to explore ways to use the least amount of power to do the most amount of computing, we'll continue to share our data and best practices with you. In early March we will participate in the CeBIT conference where we plan to disclose more details on our sustainability efforts as part of this year's theme of "Green IT." Stay tuned.

Posted by Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations

Back to the energy future

In 1979 President Jimmy Carter installed 32 solar hot water panels on the roof of the White House. Recently a Googler from our Washington D.C. office asked the question, "What ever happened to the Carter panels?" After a little digging, we were able to track down the original panels to Unity College, an environmental college in Maine, and bring one of them back to Washington D.C.

So what ever happened to the panels? It turns out that during President Reagan's administration the solar hot water panels were removed from the White House in 1986 and placed in storage. In 1992, Unity College located the panels and transferred them from a General Services Administration warehouse to their campus in Maine. After restoration,16 panels provided their cafeteria with hot water for the next 12 years. In cooperation with Unity College, Google was able to bring one of these panels down to our Washington DC office for display throughout the next year.

At the panels' dedication in 1979, Jimmy Carter stated:

"This dependence on foreign sources of oil is of great concern to all of us. In the year 2000, this solar water heater behind me, which is being dedicated today, will still be here supplying cheap, efficient energy. A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people." (To watch video of the dedication, check out this trailer for a movie about the panels).

As we welcome our new U.S. president to office this week, we wanted to share this piece of this history with you. Google is committed to a clean energy future and we hope that you will join us in supporting the creation and adoption of renewable energy technology — what could still be one of the greatest and most exciting adventures for all of us.

Check out these photos of the panels at Unity College and at Google's Washington DC office.



Posted by Alice Ryan, Green Energy Project Manager