Tag Archives: Energy + Environment

Project Sunroof New Data Explorer Tool

Google has always been a proponent of  clean energy, and solar power has been a central part of our vision. Over the past year, Project Sunroof has been helping homeowners explore whether they should go solar - offering solar estimates for over 43 million houses across 42 states. Solar installations today are growing rapidly, but there remains tremendous untapped potential as only a half a percent of US electricity comes from solar power.

Today we’re excited to be taking Project Sunroof a step further by launching a new data explorer tool to enable solar estimates for entire communities, in addition to individual homes, by leveraging 3D rooftop geometry from Google Earth to estimate the solar potential for millions of rooftops in America.  The tool helps communities, cities and municipalities easily visualize how many rooftops are suitable to install solar, how much power they could collectively generate, as well as how much carbon could be displaced by deploying rooftop solar at scale. Sunroof’s solar potential reports can also be easily shared amongst community members, researchers and policymakers directly from the the tool itself. Anyone can use this tool for free, by simply entering in a state, county, city, or zip code to receive a custom analysis.
Sunroof Image 1
Sunroof Image 2
Sunroof Image 3

Click here to see the solar potential of your community


Rooftop solar is a viable option for many cities today. Sunroof’s data explorer found that in more than 90% of communities that the tool covers within 42 states nationwide, well over half the rooftops are viable for solar. Today, cities like Denver and organizations like League of Cities see great value in using the data explorer tool to evaluate whether solar can drive economic savings and growth, as well as help transition energy consumption to lower carbon sources for their communities. Here’s what they have to say;

Cooper Martin, Program Director of the Sustainable Cities Institute,  League of Cities

“Our Sustainable Cities Institute program aims to provide guidance and information for governments that want to pursue sustainability and ensuring that solar is easy, fast and cheap to install. Sunroof's Data Explorer tool can help inform city stakeholders about the opportunity of solar energy, and the work that is needed to support solar-friendly policies. ”
Sunroof Image 4

Thomas J. Herrod, Climate and Policy analyst, City of Denver

“As a City with a bold and ambitious goal of reducing 80% of Greenhouse Gas emissions by the year 2050,  Project Sunroof data is a key tool in our arsenal of potential strategies.  Rooftop solar is already a viable option within Denver, but this tool helps us refine our efforts to ensure equity in our outreach, efficiency in our efforts, and measurement in our management resources.  Of equal importance is the ability to identify where rooftop solar may not be an option – helping us identify areas where other renewable energy programs offered by our Utility can fill the gap.  We are thrilled to be able to utilize Project Sunroof in our Climate mitigation efforts and help inform our community about the bountiful resource that renewable energy can provide.”

Mark Trout, CIO, Vivint

“In previous analysis we've done, comparing Project Sunroof data estimates to actual systems performing in the field, we've found Google's information to be a highly accurate source for predicting the solar performance of a rooftop system. At Vivint Solar we are constantly focusing on how to better delight our customers and advance the solar industry through leading innovation. Project Sunroof is a prime example how technology can improve the consumer experience and accelerate solar deployment here in the US.”

The release of the data explorer tool marks another milestone across the Project Sunroof initiative where the use of Google’s high quality information has the potential to accelerate the growth of solar by capturing the public imagination, and helping communities make smarter decisions in their transition to cleaner power sources.

Project Sunroof New Data Explorer Tool

Google has always been a proponent of  clean energy, and solar power has been a central part of our vision. Over the past year, Project Sunroof has been helping homeowners explore whether they should go solar - offering solar estimates for over 43 million houses across 42 states. Solar installations today are growing rapidly, but there remains tremendous untapped potential as only a half a percent of US electricity comes from solar power.

Today we’re excited to be taking Project Sunroof a step further by launching a new data explorer tool to enable solar estimates for entire communities, in addition to individual homes, by leveraging 3D rooftop geometry from Google Earth to estimate the solar potential for millions of rooftops in America.  The tool helps communities, cities and municipalities easily visualize how many rooftops are suitable to install solar, how much power they could collectively generate, as well as how much carbon could be displaced by deploying rooftop solar at scale. Sunroof’s solar potential reports can also be easily shared amongst community members, researchers and policymakers directly from the the tool itself. Anyone can use this tool for free, by simply entering in a state, county, city, or zip code to receive a custom analysis.
Sunroof Image 1
Sunroof Image 2
Sunroof Image 3

Click here to see the solar potential of your community


Rooftop solar is a viable option for many cities today. Sunroof’s data explorer found that in more than 90% of communities that the tool covers within 42 states nationwide, well over half the rooftops are viable for solar. Today, cities like Denver and organizations like League of Cities see great value in using the data explorer tool to evaluate whether solar can drive economic savings and growth, as well as help transition energy consumption to lower carbon sources for their communities. Here’s what they have to say;

Cooper Martin, Program Director of the Sustainable Cities Institute,  League of Cities

“Our Sustainable Cities Institute program aims to provide guidance and information for governments that want to pursue sustainability and ensuring that solar is easy, fast and cheap to install. Sunroof's Data Explorer tool can help inform city stakeholders about the opportunity of solar energy, and the work that is needed to support solar-friendly policies. ”
Sunroof Image 4

Thomas J. Herrod, Climate and Policy analyst, City of Denver

“As a City with a bold and ambitious goal of reducing 80% of Greenhouse Gas emissions by the year 2050,  Project Sunroof data is a key tool in our arsenal of potential strategies.  Rooftop solar is already a viable option within Denver, but this tool helps us refine our efforts to ensure equity in our outreach, efficiency in our efforts, and measurement in our management resources.  Of equal importance is the ability to identify where rooftop solar may not be an option – helping us identify areas where other renewable energy programs offered by our Utility can fill the gap.  We are thrilled to be able to utilize Project Sunroof in our Climate mitigation efforts and help inform our community about the bountiful resource that renewable energy can provide.”

Mark Trout, CIO, Vivint

“In previous analysis we've done, comparing Project Sunroof data estimates to actual systems performing in the field, we've found Google's information to be a highly accurate source for predicting the solar performance of a rooftop system. At Vivint Solar we are constantly focusing on how to better delight our customers and advance the solar industry through leading innovation. Project Sunroof is a prime example how technology can improve the consumer experience and accelerate solar deployment here in the US.”

The release of the data explorer tool marks another milestone across the Project Sunroof initiative where the use of Google’s high quality information has the potential to accelerate the growth of solar by capturing the public imagination, and helping communities make smarter decisions in their transition to cleaner power sources.

Source: Google LatLong


Renewable Energy Adoption Takes a New Turn with Partnership in the Netherlands

At Google, we have been committed to the adoption of clean energy since 2010, and are working aggressively to meet our goal of powering 100 percent of our operations with renewable energy.


We are excited to announce a unique partnership that Google has formed in the Netherlands with three leading companies, allowing us to significantly contribute to delivering on the Dutch renewable energy target of 14 percent by 2020, agreed to in the 2013 Dutch Energy Agreement for Sustainable Growth.


Together with AkzoNobel, DSM, and Philips, we’ve made a long-term agreement to jointly source power from renewable energy projects. The consortium represents a new approach for corporations to explore market opportunities, enter into renewable Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) and meet the demands of growing sustainability targets in a cost-effective and scalable way.


The first agreement of the long-term collaboration purchases the entire power production from a new wind farm established by a cooperative of 4,000 people in the Dutch province of Zeeland. Five percent of the power production will be reserved for the shareholders, with each company receiving a quarter share of the remaining 95 percent of energy. It’s the first time in the Netherlands that a group of multinational companies has teamed up with local citizens to create what is effectively a consumer-to-business energy partnership.


The consortium has agreed to source a total of 0.35 terawatt hours (TWh) a year from Windpark Krammer once it becomes fully operational in 2019. This is equivalent to the total annual consumption of 100,000 households.


The agreement is both crucial for the funding of the wind farm and for the renewable energy goals of all four companies. For Google, this agreement will allow our data center in Eemshaven to be powered with renewable energy from day one when it opens later this year.


Our participation in this consortium is part of our broader global strategy to procure renewable energy for our data centers, and build on similar agreements signed in other countries. Google now has six PPAs in the Nordics, seven in Europe, and 19 globally.


Additionally, we have purchased 148 megawatts (MW) of new renewable energy in Sweden, to supply our European data centers with renewable energy. This PPA will secure 70 percent of the production over ten years of this 41-turbine wind farm located in Lehtirova, northern Sweden. Each new wind farm is being built in one of the best areas for onshore wind in Europe. Thanks to Europe’s increasingly integrated energy market, we’re able to buy wind energy in Norway and Sweden, and consume it elsewhere in Europe.

As the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy in the world, we are thrilled to be joining forces with these leading companies in the Netherlands. By working together, we can realize a clean energy future–faster than ever.

Renewable energy adoption takes a new turn with partnership in the Netherlands

At Google, we have been committed to the adoption of clean energy since 2010, and are working aggressively to meet our goal of powering 100 percent of our operations with renewable energy.

We are excited to announce a unique partnership that Google has formed in the Netherlands with three leading companies, allowing us to significantly contribute to delivering on the Dutch renewable energy target of 14 percent by 2020, agreed to in the 2013 Dutch Energy Agreement for Sustainable Growth.

Together with AkzoNobel, DSM, and Philips, we’ve made a long-term agreement to jointly source power from renewable energy projects. The consortium represents a new approach for corporations to explore market opportunities, enter into renewable Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) and meet the demands of growing sustainability targets in a cost-effective and scalable way.

The first agreement of the long-term collaboration purchases the entire power production from a new wind farm established by a cooperative of 4,000 people in the Dutch province of Zeeland. Five percent of the power production will be reserved for the shareholders, with each company receiving a quarter share of the remaining 95 percent of energy. It’s the first time in the Netherlands that a group of multinational companies has teamed up with local citizens to create what is effectively a consumer-to-business energy partnership.

The consortium has agreed to source a total of 0.35 terawatt hours (TWh) a year from Windpark Krammer once it becomes fully operational in 2019. This is equivalent to the total annual consumption of 100,000 households.

The agreement is both crucial for the funding of the wind farm and for the renewable energy goals of all four companies. For Google, this agreement will allow our data center in Eemshaven to be powered with renewable energy from day one when it opens later this year.

Our participation in this consortium is part of our broader global strategy to procure renewable energy for our data centers, and build on similar agreements signed in other countries. Google now has six PPAs in the Nordics, seven in Europe, and 19 globally.

Additionally, we have purchased 148 megawatts (MW) of new renewable energy in Sweden, to supply our European data centers with renewable energy. This PPA will secure 70 percent of the production over ten years of this 41-turbine wind farm located in Lehtirova, northern Sweden. Each new wind farm is being built in one of the best areas for onshore wind in Europe. Thanks to Europe’s increasingly integrated energy market, we’re able to buy wind energy in Norway and Sweden, and consume it elsewhere in Europe.

As the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy in the world, we are thrilled to be joining forces with these leading companies in the Netherlands. By working together, we can realize a clean energy future–faster than ever.

Google launches healthy building materials Tool to change an industry

At Google, we are committed to creating the healthiest work environment possible and using building products that promote human and environmental health and transparency. Inspired by this challenge, we have been making great strides toward giving everyone access to the information needed to understand human and environmental impacts of materials so we can make healthy decisions backed by science. This means you can know all the ingredients of every product in your environment──from the chair you are sitting in, to the paint you purchased for your living room──just like the nutrition labels on the food you buy at your neighborhood grocery store.

While a robust framework for gathering product information is important; it is also critical to build processes and tools that can be used to select and specify healthy materials. Embracing this challenge to serve the scale at which Google operates resulted in the creation of Portico, an online web application that Google developed in partnership with non-profit partner Healthy Building Network (HBN).

Since 2015, Google has been testing Portico on internal design and construction projects and using it to establish and communicate the company’s values and priorities around human health, informing decisions that meet Google’s healthy materials criteria, and product scoring based on reliable and transparent manufacturer supplied data. To-date, we have used Portico on over 195 projects in 20 countries and over 1,500 project team members and 5,000 manufacturers participating, contributing to a growing database of over 2,500 products that have satisfied Google’s healthy material requirements.

Based on the successes from this internal testing, Google and HBN have announced today the expansion of Portico with the addition of four new partners: Harvard University, Perkins + Will, The Durst Organization and HomeFree Affordable Housing (an HBN-led affordable housing consortium). As industry thought leaders, this group of organizations have adopted Portico as a critical tool to support their mission and commitment for creating a healthy built environment.
REWS building interior 02

Portico was created to bridge the gap in the marketplace with a platform that combines a product database and collaborative workflow tools, built on an open source mode. The goal was to create a place where the information could be gathered in a sharable format that could then be searched and interpreted by anyone using the tool.

Furthermore, the tool itself can host a diverse set of applications that are built based on the needs of its end users. This is powerful. With Portico, instead of being limited by how the data can be used and shared, the tool offers an opportunity to expand the boundaries of the problems that data can solve, making it possible for the building industry community to ask more audacious questions and solve more complex problems than any individual or organization alone.

Over the next year, Google will be working closely with these partners to continue evolving and expanding Portico so it is able to solve critical problems beyond the needs of a set of organizations. By leveraging the power of technology to continue to optimize and develop the platform, Portico can be used at the ecosystem scale. With this incremental step of opening Portico to a group of partners other than Google, we hope to build a future where individuals and organizations of any size are able to have open access to information that is essential to creating environments that are optimized for human and environmental health. This bright future is not only a win for Google but for many generations to come.

Mapping global fishing activity with machine learning

The world’s oceans and fisheries are at a turning point. Over a billion people depend on wild-caught fish for their primary source of protein. Fisheries are intertwined with global food security, slave labor issues, livelihoods, sovereign wealth and biodiversity but our fisheries are being harvested beyond sustainable levels. Fish populations have already plummeted by 90 percent for some species within the last generation, and the human population is only growing larger. One in five fish entering global markets is harvested illegally, or is unreported or unregulated. But amidst all these sobering trends, we're also better equipped to face these challenges — thanks to the rise of technology, increased availability of information, and a growing international desire to create a sustainable future.

Today, in partnership with Oceana and SkyTruth, we’re launching Global Fishing Watch, a beta technology platform intended to increase awareness of fisheries and influence sustainable policy through transparency. Global Fishing Watch combines cloud computing technology with satellite data to provide the world’s first global view of commercial fishing activities. It gives anyone around the world — citizens, governments, industry, and researchers — a free, simple, online platform to visualize, track, and share information about fishing activity worldwide.

Global_Fishing-Effort.gif
Global Fishing Watch, the first global view of large scale commercial fishing activity over time

At any given time, there are about 200,000 vessels publicly broadcasting their location at sea through the Automatic Identification System (AIS). Their signals are picked up by dozens of satellites and thousands of terrestrial receivers. Global Fishing Watch runs this information — more than 22 million points of information per day — through machine learning classifiers to determine the type of ship (e.g., cargo, tug, sail, fishing), what kind of fishing gear (longline, purse seine, trawl) they’re using and where they’re fishing based on their movement patterns. To do this, our research partners and fishery experts have manually classified thousands of vessel tracks as training data to “teach” our algorithms what fishing looks like. We then apply that learning to the entire dataset — 37 billion points over the last 4.5 years — enabling anyone to see the individual tracks and fishing activity of every vessel along with its name and flag state.

Valmitao.gif
An individual vessel fishing off Madagascar

This data can help inform sustainable policy and identify suspicious behaviors for further investigation. By understanding what areas of the ocean are being heavily fished, agencies and governments can make important decisions about how much fishing should be allowed in any given area. Often, fish populations are so depleted that the only way to ensure they are replenished is to create “no take areas” where fishing is not allowed. Our hope is that this new technology can help governments and other organizations make decisions about which areas need protection and monitor if policies are respected.

PIPA_Closure.gif
Kiribati's Phoenix Island Protected Area transitioning from heavy tuna fishing to a protected area
Partners have already started using Global Fishing Watch and have committed to providing additional data sources for greater impact:

  • Indonesia’s Minister of Fisheries and Marine Affairs, Susi Pudjiastuti, has committed to making the government’s Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) public in Global Fishing Watch in 2017. Ibu Susi has been a progressive leader for transparency in fisheries with other governments now expressing similar interest to collaborate.
  • Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations will collaborate on new research methodologies for reporting spatial fishery and vessel statistics, building on Global Fishing Watch and developing transparency tools to support their member states in improving the monitoring, control and surveillance of fishing activities.
  • Trace Register, a seafood digital supply chain company, has committed to using Global Fishing Watch to verify catch documentation for its customers such as Whole Foods.
  • Bali Seafood, the largest exporter of snapper from Indonesia, has teamed up with Pelagic Data Systems, manufacturers of cellular and solar powered tracking devices to bring the same transparency for small scale and artisanal fishing vessels, into Global Fishing Watch as part of a pilot program.
We’ve also developed a Global Fishing Watch Research Program with 10 leading institutions from around the world. By combining Google tools, methodologies, and datasets in a collaborative environment, they’re modeling economic, environmental, policy, and climate change implications on fisheries at a scale not otherwise possible.

Global Fishing Watch was not possible five years ago. From a technology perspective, satellites were just beginning to collect vessel positions over the open ocean, and the "global coverage" was spotty. There has been tremendous growth in machine learning with applications in new fields. Policy and regulatory frameworks have evolved, with the United States, European Union, and other nations and Regional Fishery Management Organizations now requiring that vessels broadcast their positions. Market forces and import laws are beginning to demand transparency and traceability, both as a positive differentiator and for risk management. All of these forces interact and shape each other.

Today, Global Fishing Watch is an early preview of what is possible. We’re committed to continuing to build tools, partnerships, and access to information to help restore our abundant ocean for generations to come.

Go explore your ocean at www.globalfishingwatch.org.

Source: Google LatLong


Can you run a data center without waste? We are now in Singapore and Taiwan

Did you know that Singapore is projected to run out of landfill space by 2035? According to the Singaporean government, every year 200,000 tons of solid waste and ash are received at the Semakau landfill. That’s a lot of trash – equivalent to the weight of 18 Eiffel towers, 25,000 elephants or 100,000 houses.

Today, we’re excited to announce that none of that waste comes directly from our data center here in Singapore (or, to landfills in Taiwan, from our data center there). That’s because both our Singapore and Taiwan data centers have reached a 100% landfill diversion rate, in line with a global commitment we’ve made to achieve “zero waste to landfill” for our data centers globally.

This zero waste to landfill effort is part of a broader goal we have at Google to weavecircular economy principles into everything we do. That means instead of using raw resources (timber and ore, for example) to create new products, we keep materials in circulation for multiple uses, whether they are maintained, reused, refurbished, or recycled.

So how do we accomplish this at our data centers here in Asia, where our servers that help millions of people across the region Search, keep in touch over Gmail and stream millions of hours of YouTube a day need constant upgrading and maintenance?

To start, before we buy any new equipment or materials, we look for ways to reuse what we already have. Last year, more than half of the components we used for machine upgrades were from refurbished inventory. With the remaining equipment, we resold most into secondary markets for reuse by other organizations, and we recycled a small percentage of un-reusable hardware.

That covers the machines, but what about everything else? To reduce daily waste, we encourage Googlers to be environmentally conscious. We make recycling very easy by placing waste sorting bins like the below throughout the facilities in strategic locations.

recycling
Sorting cans in Singapore on top, and food and other waste sorting bins in Taiwan on bottom

For the small amount of waste that is still produced locally, we use our own trash disposal systems like this trash compactor at our facility in Singapore:

compactor

In addition to our two facilities in Asia, four of our other data centers in Europe and the U.S. -- nearly half -- have achieved 100% landfill diversion of all waste to date. And we’re committed to achieving zero waste at the rest of our data centers soon. As my colleague Jim Miller observed, it’s just the kind of challenge that excites us.