Google’s Biggest Moonshot Is Its Search for a Carbon-Free Future

Google Bay View, the company’s newest campus, consists of three squat buildings nestled near the San Francisco Bay shoreline a few miles east of its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. The first things visitors notice are the roofs.

Photographer: Kelsey McClellan for Bloomberg Green

They curve down gently from pinched peaks, like circus tents, sloping almost to the ground. Each roof is blanketed with overlapping solar panels that glisten with a brushed metal sheen on the edges. Google calls this design Dragonscale, and indeed it looks as if a mystical beast is curled up by the water in Silicon Valley.

Google envisions its latest campus as the embodiment of a grander ambition to run its operations entirely free of carbon. The company plans to open Bay View in January to “a limited number” of employees, depending on the pandemic. Beneath the buildings, thousands of concrete pillars plunged into the ground will serve as a sort of geothermal battery, storing heat to warm the building and water supply without natural gas. The roof panels were constructed with a unique textured glass to prevent glare and with canopies that emit a soft, glowing light into the spacious atria inside. “We call this the Cathedral of Work,” says Asim Tahir, who oversees energy decisions in Google’s real estate division. He stands by the southern entrance in a hard hat, mask, and safety vest.

Last year, Pichai announced Google’s plan to run every office and data center on electricity from clean sources, around the clock. He set 2030 as the deadline, marking perhaps the most ambitious corporate commitment to decarbonization ever. Google calls it a moonshot, the term it reserves for audacious—and so far mostly fruitless—projects such as self-driving cars and delivery drones. “It’s a bit stressful,” Pichai says, “because we don’t fully have all the answers to get there.”

Google’s data centers, which house the servers that power billions of web searches, emails, and mapping routes every day, account for most of its electricity consumption: 15.1 million megawatt-hours in 2020. Last year, Google met 67% of its data center electricity needs with renewable sources on an hourly basis, a 6% jump from the prior year. Data centers in certain places, such as Oklahoma and Oregon, run on close to or above 90% clean sources.

But getting off carbon elsewhere is a bigger challenge, and Google is aiming well beyond typical corporate targets. Dozens of companies have pledged to reach carbon neutrality, covering their energy usage either with renewable sources or offsets. (A carbon offset is a credit companies can buy that stands in for one ton of emissions that otherwise would have polluted the atmosphere; the money is supposed to go toward emissions-reducing projects.)

Apple Inc. achieved carbon neutrality with its own operations and vowed to do the same with its supply chain by 2030. Amazon.com Inc. promised to be carbon neutral by 2040. Google aims to go even further. It’s committed to go free of carbon, without using offsets and relying only on clean energy purchased near its locations, 24 hours a day. That means in Chile, where solar panels power Google’s data center during the day, the company must find a solution when the sun sets. In dense Taiwan and Singapore, where its data centers run almost entirely on fossil fuels, it must find massive amounts of green alternatives very quickly.

To hit its goal, Google is relying on unorthodox procurement contracts and a grab bag of novel technologies such as lithium-ion battery storage, algorithms that predict wind patterns, and geothermal wells that drill into the Earth’s crust. Earlier this summer, Microsoft Corp. followed Google with another pledge to go carbon-free 24/7. These companies, pioneers of innovation worth trillions, are trying to cut out carbon while still maintaining spectacular growth: Google and Microsoft added more than $91 billion in profits last year as much of the economy contracted. Although they’re huge and influential energy consumers, they’re mostly at the mercy of antiquated utilities built on fossil fuels. Google knows this. “The ultimate solution is to get the power grids to carbon-free all the time,” says Michael Terrell, Google’s director of energy. “We still don’t know the path everywhere, and that’s really challenging.”

Google’s environmental record isn’t spotless. Critics have charged it with funding politicians who deny global warming, accepting green-washing advertisements, and boosting climate conspiracies on YouTube. Employees have condemned its cloud-computing deals with oil companies. Google server farms use considerable amounts of water. Yet the company’s approach to renewable energy—it purchased 15.4 million megawatt-hours in 2020—has earned widespread praise. Risk management company MSCI Inc. grades Google poorly on governance and social impact, citing its numerous competition lawsuits; on environmental issues, it gives Google perfect marks.

Pichai has pledged that Google’s climate work will create more than 20,000 clean energy jobs and help hundreds of cities reduce carbon footprints. Google will need to spend considerable amounts to become carbon-free, and it might have to curb its enormous appetite for computing horsepower.

Still, the effort makes business sense for Pichai, who says Google’s investments will drive down costs for existing renewables and spur new ones. Google will try selling some energy efficiency technologies, too. Tech employees are starting to demand greener business practices and sustainable workspaces such as the Bay View campus, not simply as niceties but as vital parts of making the future livable. Pichai says businesses that don’t get off carbon will be left in the dust. “If you don’t do this correctly, you won’t be able to attract talent,” he says. “When I look at the younger generation, people who are teenagers now, I can’t see them making the choice to work for a company which they feel is polluting.”

Google began planning its Bay View campus in 2015, but its design ideas took seed well before then. The company’s founders had a crunchy California streak, demanding its first offices include low-impact carpets and recyclable materials. Tinkering staff once stuck 12 bores into the pavement as an early geothermal experiment, which pumped up hot water for a campus cafe. Engineers played around with solar prototypes in a parking lot.

These green projects were also about saving money. Fifteen years ago the search engine was expanding ferociously, adding energy-hungry services such as Gmail and YouTube. “That was always really shocking when you looked at the bill,” recalls Urs Hölzle, a senior vice president and early employee. In 2007, Google installed a 1.6MW solar array atop its headquarters and started a program to fund a slate of renewable projects with the aim of driving their costs below coal—they named the project REC.

That year, Google also claimed it had offset all its carbon emissions, though it shared little data. “They said, ‘We’re carbon neutral—trust us,’ ” remembers Gary Cook, who tracked technology companies for Greenpeace Inc.

Solar and wind prices fell precipitously, prompting Google to drop REC. Yet it kept buying renewables. It made a power purchase agreement (PPA) in 2010 for a 114MW wind farm in Iowa. Two years later the company set a goal to buy enough excess renewables to cover the amount of fossil fuels it used. The company assumed this process would take a decade. Thanks to a rush of new wind farms and solar systems, it took five years.

With that achievement, Google was hailed in the press as “100% renewable.” Some employees, however, bristled at the technical inaccuracy, according to Hölzle, who oversees Google infrastructure. Google didn’t use renewables 100% of the time. “Take this data center, at this time,” Hölzle recalls the argument. “Clearly it is using coal.” Google needed a better goal.

• Bloomberg