Google says its customers can use new data on server farms' performance to inform decisions on where to base their Google Cloud operations
Tech giant Google has today released a raft of data illuminating the level of progress towards its overarching climate goal of running the firm's global operations entirely on carbon-free energy.
The data, which reveals what proportion of the firm's Google Cloud energy supply is clean in each of the regions it operates, will enable Google customers to incorporate emissions data into decisions about where to base their Google Cloud operations, the firm said.
Data centres, which power cloud computing services, are critical for a host of low-carbon technologies and services. But they are also energy-intensive, accounting for an estimated one per cent of electricity consumption worldwide in 2019 . The sector's share of global energy use is expected to grow as new technologies, such as autonomous vehicles, smart grids, and distributed manufacturing systems, all increase demand for computing power. Some models suggest that, left unchecked, data centre energy usage could consume more than 10 per cent of the global electricity supply by 2030.
As a result, enhancing the efficiency of data centres and decarbonising their electricity supplies is among the biggest challenges facing computing giants like Google as they race to slash emissions across their global operations. Google has previously laid out a roadmap for how it aims to meet its climate goals, which would see the power supply mix in each Google Cloud region gradually tilted further towards clean energy and away for fossil fuels, with the resulting progress calculated via a "Carbon Free Energy Percentage" score.
Since 2017, Google has purchased sufficient solar and wind energy to match 100 per cent of its global electricity consumption on an annual basis. As such the CFE scores reflect how well-matched the carbon-free energy supply in a particular region is with the firm's power demand, meaning that a lower-scoring region has more hours in the year without a matching, local amount of carbon-free energy.
The firm's new data drop reveals average CFE percentages across the majority of the firm's Google Cloud regions - charting real-time progress towards the firm's 100 per cent clean energy goal. The highest-scoring regions are concentrated in the Americas and Europe - - Oregon boasts a score of 89 per cent and Sao Paulo achieved 87 per cent, while Finland reached 77 per cent and Belgium 68 per cent. In contrast, the lowest scores are more geographically spread, with Singapore scoring just three per cent, Sydney 11 per cent, and Las Vegas 13 per cent.
The information enables Google's customers to incorporate carbon emission levels into decisions on where to base their services within Google's infrastructure, adding emissions considerations to others such as a region's price or latency.
The firm suggests its customers utilise the data by picking a lower-carbon region for their new applications, running batch jobs in low carbon regions, or setting an organisational policy to restrict the location of their cloud resources to a particular region or sub-set of regions.