Cloud Computing: Why Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are buying up wind energy
November 9, 2014
Grazed from Washington Post. Author: Editorial Staff.
As of now, the top three most widely used U.S. search engines, by a considerable margin, are Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing. If you live in this country and you are actually online, there’s well over a 90 percent chance that you use one of them, according to the web data company comScore. This we all know. But what few people realize is that if you are using these searches, it is growing more and more likely that you are also engaging in what is, in effect, a green pattern of Internet use.
The reason? Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are part of a growing number of tech and other major companies that are entering into long-term “power purchase” agreements (PPAs) with wind farms to ensure a steady stream of power, at a fixed cost, over a period as long as several decades. Most recently, last month Yahoo signed such a deal for wind power in the Great Plains with OwnEnergy, a wind energy developer…
Google — which is already carbon neutral and now trying to power itself with “100 percent renewable energy” — has the longest history here. It has three PPA deals in the U.S. wind sector (in Iowa, Oklahoma, and Texas), and two more in Sweden. Microsoft, meanwhile, currently has two PPA deals with wind installments located near its data centers in Texas and Illinois. The agreements provide 285 megawatts of power to help drive both Bing searches and also its other online platforms, according to Brian Janous, the company’s director of energy strategy…
Read more from the source @ http://www.standard.net/Business/2014/11/09/Like-kite-surfing-the-Internet-Why-Google-Microsoft-and-Yahoo-are-buying-up-wind-energy-2.html