Google “Renewable Energy Tariff” White Paper

April 24th, 2013 by Dr. Karl-Friedrich Lenz

Google has released a White Paper titled “Expanding Renewable Energy Options For Companies Through Utility-Offered ‘Renewable Energy Tariffs.'” Thanks to this blog post by North American Windpower and this tweet by Chris Young for the link.

Google has invested over $1 billion in renewable energy projects. It has two basic policy guidelines. From the White Paper:

• First, our efforts must result in “additional” renewable power generation. We’re not interested in reshuffling the output of existing projects, and where possible, we want to undertake efforts near our data centers and operations.

• Second, we want our activities to be scalable and have the highest possible impact on the industry. When possible, our efforts should directly address problems that limit the growth of renewable energy.

As a consequence, Google’s approach until now was either building and owning the capacity themselves — as with the 1.7 MW solar PV at Google headquarters — or buying the electricity directly from a renewable project owned by someone else, and selling excess capacity back into the grid.

Now they are proposing “renewable energy tariffs.” That is not, as one might misunderstand, a feed-in tariff. Instead, it is something the German utility Lichtblick has done for 15 years. Google wants a utility to deliver renewable energy (at a higher price than dirty energy). They want someone else to worry about all the problems associated with selling clean energy and concentrate on developing new search engines. That makes sense.

It made sense in Germany 15 years ago when Lichtblick was founded, a utility that sells only renewable electricity. It made sense in Germany 5 years ago when the German Parliament decided to buy their electricity from Lichtblick, going all renewable.

Of course there is a market for clean electricity. Some American utility should start serving it.

Google proposes to start this market by selling to large industrial customers. But there is really no reason why household customers should be excluded from buying clean energy. Lichtblick has over 600,000 customers now, and of course most of them are private citizens.

And while I am at it, Google might want to locate a couple of data centers in the Sahara and Gobi deserts. That would be rather compatible with their principle #2 mentioned above. Having this large source of electricity demand would help getting desert projects off the ground as long as the World Wide Grid is still not available.

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Tags: Germany, Google, Lichtblick, Renewable Energy Tariff

About the Author

Dr. Karl-Friedrich Lenz is a professor of German and European Law at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, blogging since 2003 at Lenz Blog. A free PDF file of his global warming science fiction novel "Great News" is available here.

Otis11

You were going great until the “Sahara and Gobi deserts” part… Data centers have massive cooling needs that often make up almost half of their power consumption and require significant amounts of water. If these data centers are properly situated where this waste heat can be used or in places where natural cooling can be harnessed, power and water consumption can be minimized. The desert fits neither of these.
- http://twitter.com/Kf_Lenz Karl-Friedrich Lenz
  
  Thanks. Actually that was a proposal from lead Bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen, mining Bitcoin in desert areas. I plan to blog about that tomorrow, and your point needs discussing. Thanks again.
  
  As for the Gobi, it is actually very cold there in most time slots. And if you think there is no water there, you would be wrong. Oyu Tolgoi will use the Gunii Holoi fossil water aquifer, as discussed at Lenz Blog. That is admittedly somewhat surprising. I would have thought that there is no water in the Gobi as well before reading the Oyu Tolgoi environmental impact reports.
  - http://zacharyshahan.com/ Zachary Shahan
    
    Wow, interesting notes about the Gobi…
  - Otis11
    
    Huh… I thought about the Sahara and Gobi never clicked. (Yeah, I’m pretty sleep deprived)
    
    Gobi might work…would have to see about the water though, because a data center will evaporate much of that water away, so it needs to be a constant supply as even a large reserve isn’t really sustainable
    
    Also, what about Tibet? IIRC it’s fairly cold as well, and has lots of sun (not to mention wind)
    
    Although, geographically Asia is my weakest point so I could be mistaken…
anderlan

Yes but what trained techs would want to relocate in the desert? Maybe where it bordered the sea.
- http://twitter.com/Kf_Lenz Karl-Friedrich Lenz
  
  You would need to force them to do so by the evil but mostly successful method of paying them more money. Or you would need to train some locals.
  - anderlan
    
    You do realize this is a business decision with cost/benefit analyses, right?