Last year, Google committed to using carbon-free energy 24 hours a day by 2030 as its “largest sustainable moon initiative.” To achieve this, Google says it will take advantage of new technologies and announced a “next generation geothermal project” at I/O 2021.
Google’s next environmental goal isn’t just to buy renewable energy for all the electricity used in its data centers and offices. At the time, the company said the effort would require “New Deal structures, advances in clean energy policies, and innovative new technologies.”
It began with the so-called Next Generation Geothermal Project, which Google created in partnership with clean energy startup Fervo. The decisive aspect is that it is “always-on,” providing a continuous supply of carbon-free energy that will add “robust” geothermal energy to Nevada’s grid system by 2022. Google will use it to power its Las Vegas Cloud area and other data centers in the state.
It is important that the partnership for the next generation of geothermal as a kind of stability and flexibility of carbon-free energy create conditions play a role, especially in expanding and improving the electric power market, innovation technology, deployment, and increase the clean energy research, development and demonstration (RD&D) investment policy, the energy can be more and more to replace the carbon emissions of fossil fuel.
Today, due to cost and location constraints, geothermal accounts for only a “small percentage of global clean energy production.” Google hopes to solve these problems by making the project use advanced drilling and analysis technology. For example, fiber optic cables in the well will provide real-time flow, temperature and performance data.
This data enables Fervo to accurately determine the existence of optimal resources, making it possible to control flow at different depths. Combined with developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning described above, these capabilities could boost productivity and unleash flexible geothermal energy in a range of new places.
Fervo and Google will use AI and ML to improve the productivity of this next-generation geothermal.
The company also announced today that it will move non-emergency handling of YouTube, photos, Drive and other types of media to a data center that — except for the time of day — has the most carbon-free electricity. Google will use “ahead of the day projections” of its reliance on carbon-intensive energy and consider privacy laws when deciding where to move work.
Now, Google’s Global Carbon Smart Computing Platform will increasingly conserve and use every hour of computing capacity on the world’s cleanest grid for these computing jobs — meaning it shifts as much energy consumption as possible to times and places where the energy is cleaner, minimizing carbon-intensive energy consumption.
This article translated from 9 to5google.com/2021/05/18/…