"We've set a goal to achieve net-zero emissions across all of our operations and value chain by 2030." and, in a table later, "Reduce 50% of our combined Scope 1, 2 (market-based), and 3 absolute emissions by 2030. Invest in nature-based and technology-based carbon removal solutions to neutralize our remaining emissions." and "Run on 24/7 carbon-free energy on every grid where we operate by 2030."
"We aim to run on 24/7 carbon-free energy on every grid where we operate by 2030." and "We aim to reduce absolute, combined scope 1, 2 (market-based), and 3 emissions by 50% from a 2019 base year by 2030." (They also restate the thing about "to neutralize our remaining emissions" a bit later in the document.)
Exactly the same stated goals, just written in a different place. There's more hedging around it now: they call it a "moonshot" and say that they might not manage it, but they never actually promised to do it before.
notatoad · 6h ago
carbon-free energy on every grid where they operate also sounds like a significantly more ambitious goal than net-zero across the company, because it means actual reduction in emissions, rather than relying on offsets.
if it's a serious committment to being carbon-free, i think this sounds like a positive change. if it's a moonshot that they have no real intention of actually meeting, then it's a lot less impressive. i guess we'll see...
IshKebab · 5h ago
> carbon-free energy on every grid where they operate also sounds like a significantly more ambitious goal than net-zero across the company, because it means actual reduction in emission
Not necessarily. In the UK the market for zero-emission electricity is separated from the actual electricity itself. So you basically sell the "greenness" of the electricity separately from the electricity itself. Customers who want green electricity buy the electricity, and buy some "greenness" (called a REGO).
It does make sense, and a lot of people claim it's some kind of scam when it really isn't... But it does make the relationship between the consumption and production of green energy more complex.
For example, suppose 10% of power comes from green energy, but only 5% of people care about it remotely. The market value of a REGO is basically zero. Even if the number of people who care about green energy doubles to 10%, there's still perfect supply so the market value is still zero and it won't have any effect on green energy production. That isn't quite the case but it doesn't seem far off - I couldn't find up-to-date numbers but it seems like the market price of REGOs is on the order of £5-15/MWh, which is very low. Probably because the UK's energy mix is actually very green these days.
No idea how common this system is in other countries.
p1mrx · 4h ago
"24/7 carbon-free energy" is actually a much stronger goal, because (for example) it's physically impossible to buy solar/wind energy on a calm night, so they would need to pay more for an alternative like batteries or nuclear.
jltsiren · 4h ago
It would have been an ambitious goal in 2010. But the fundamental issue with it is similar to buying offsets.
If you are connected to the grid, the power you use is effectively generated by the power plant with the highest marginal costs. That often means fossil fuels. It doesn't matter whether you are buying generic power from the grid, or if you have a contract stating that the power you use is generated by renewables or nuclear. If you disconnect from the grid, the overall demand goes down, and some of the most expensive generation capacity is no longer needed.
In the long term, if there are many customers buying explicitly carbon-free power from the grid, it may increase the construction of new carbon-free generation capacity. But that effect is difficult to quantify.
p1mrx · 3h ago
"In 2024, we increased our 24/7 CFE percentage from 64% to 66%, and nine out of 20 grid regions with Google-owned and -operated data centers achieved at least 80% CFE."
Look at those numbers. 100% still is a very ambitious goal. Currently 0 global customers are buying 24/7 carbon free power from the grid, and even getting from 0 to 1 will require a lot of boots on the ground building real infrastructure. Afterwards, getting from 1 to [everyone] is just a matter of scale.
Even the "lazy" strategy of buying up capacity from existing nuclear plants requires outbidding the existing customers (if the law allows it), and only works in regions where nuclear plants actually exist.
jltsiren · 3h ago
Buying carbon-free power from the grid was a big thing in Finland (and maybe in wider Europe) around 2010. But companies eventually stopped talking about it, as it's mostly greenwashing with limited real-world impact.
p1mrx · 3h ago
Were they buying time-independent blocks of carbon-free power, or 24/7 carbon-free power? The latter is significantly more difficult.
jltsiren · 3h ago
24/7. There was enough hydro and nuclear in the grid, and even more in the connected grids in Norway and Sweden. Most of the time, carbon-free power was no more expensive than generic power, which emphasized how meaningless the entire idea was.
It was a byproduct of the EU habit to create markets and competition where they don't naturally exist. You can buy electricity from any power company, and that company can then generate it itself or buy it from the market. Once you have a market like that, it's easy to add requirements such as carbon-free power. As long as the fraction of the market buying indulgences is lower than the share of the power generation meeting the requirements, fulfilling them is essentially free.
p1mrx · 3h ago
> Most of the time, carbon-free power was no more expensive than generic power
Okay, let's ignore "most of the time" and focus on times when carbon-free power was more expensive. Were these companies actually footing the bill in that case? Because increasing the marginal funding toward clean sources when the grid is dirtiest is the whole point.
jltsiren · 2h ago
You can pay the market price for power or agree on a fixed-term fixed-price contract. In the latter case, the power company carries the risks. The market is cheaper on the average, especially if you can adjust your demand down when the prices are high. Back then, the prices were relatively stable, but today they fluctuate wildly due to the prevalence of wind power.
In any case, carbon-free power from the grid is mostly a legal/financial construct with limited real-world impact. When the grid is dirtiest, market prices are set by fossil fuels with high marginal costs, and clean sources get the same price without any tricks.
simianwords · 5h ago
What’s the real difference? Don’t offsets also do the same thing?
If I emit 5g of CO2 but purchase similar in offsets - the offsets have to achieve a reduction of 5g unless something like a scam is going on.
jampa · 5h ago
"Carbon offsetting is like saying to your husband or spouse: ‘I’m going to cheat, but I’ll buy you a diamond ring.’"
Sometimes, the carbon offsets are from projects that would be built anyway, and there is a lot of sketchiness all around.
It might be better than nothing or it might empower companies to pollute more and then say, "Look, we are offsetting all this!"
shaftway · 5h ago
I like how your example still involves moving carbon around.
foota · 5h ago
Some of these offsets are of dubious quality. E.g., I think some of these offsets are from _not_ doing something that you might have otherwise done, but maybe you wouldn't have done that thing regardless.
simianwords · 5h ago
Interesting. Maybe the offset should be the expected value of co2 that would not be emitted after accounting for probability. It doesn’t seem like a scam fundamentally.
notatoad · 5h ago
i think that's exactly it, it's not fundamentally a scam, but it's not as simple as 1:1 "5g in, 5g out" because there's always some formula to calculate how much carbon has been "saved" by the company selling the offsets taking whatever actions they are taking. which gives the companies selling offsets a financial motive to maximize that calculation, and in some cases does lead to outright scams.
the classic example is landowners selling offsets for the mature forests on their land - that's good! and incentivising the preservation of forests is good! but that forest already existed, and has existed for hundreds of years, so does it really make sense that some company can count it against their carbon emissions and claim to be "net zero" just because they paid a landowner to not cut it down?
it makes the whole concept of offsets less of an overall pure good than emitters simply not emitting carbon in the first place, because that is actually a very simple and clear calculation.
colechristensen · 5h ago
Some of those "avoided" things can be as dumb as having a parcel of forested land that you didn't chop down. Those trees were already there and claims that they might not have otherwise been without a little credit money are questionable.
p1mrx · 4h ago
The biggest problem with carbon offsets is that they're not pinned to a particular time of day.
If you buy a 1 GWh block of wind/solar energy for a month, you're not doing anything to supply clean energy when it's dark and the wind isn't blowing.
"24/7 carbon free" means increasing the time resolution from 1 month to 1 hour, and funding projects that deliver clean energy when you're actually using it. This includes stuff like batteries, nuclear, and geothermal.
stocksinsmocks · 4h ago
That assumes the seller of the offset actually offset something rather than created an opaque paper trail that makes it impossible to know if they did anything at all. I don’t think Carbon market makers have a good track record.
colechristensen · 5h ago
It's going to happen anyway for at least a large portion of every day simply because it's cheaper. Electricity is a sizable chunk of the cost to operate a datacenter and at least while the sun is up, solar is significantly cheaper than any other energy source. Grid scale battery overnights is cheaper but less so obviously.
You don't need climate pledges when the thing you're pledging to do saves you substantial amounts of money, and we really don't need quite so much climate moralizing when now the transition to carbon free electricity seems obvious, inevitable, and imminent because of direct immediate cost.
Now the question is just how can we accelerate this a little without creating false economies or distorting the market too much, just a small incentive here and penalty there along with funding for big projects to make them happen earlier.
p1mrx · 3h ago
> It's going to happen anyway for at least a large portion of every day simply because it's cheaper.
That's precisely why a 24/7 goal matters. Energy is already cheap and clean for a large portion of the day, but covering the rest of the day will require significant investment.
colechristensen · 54m ago
The reason electricity is cheap at night is that non-variable sources have fixed cost and the capacity is going wasted when unused. Solar having the daily peak is going to invert this so nighttime electricity is going to get considerably more expensive. Solar maximum is going to be the cheapest electricity of the day.
There are a few residential utilities in Australia which give users free electricity for 3 hours a day to encourage users to divert their usage to that period.
Widespread solar deployment significantly changes the electricity market. Further deployment is going to push fossil plants to charge higher rates when they're needed to the point where supply outstrips demand and it becomes cheaper to shut down a plant which will further increase overnight prices.
thegreatpeter · 2h ago
How did the journalists who do this full time for a living, miss this part?
downrightmike · 6h ago
They should just pave the mojave with solar panels. Nearly no one lives there and no one wants to live there and it is dead center to western states.
If China can pave mountains, a little desert with caliche should be easy
tjwebbnorfolk · 6h ago
As a rule, if you're tempted to begin any sentence with "they should just..." -- don't.
Electrical signal attenuation increases with the square of the distance, so you'll lose ~95% of the power to heat loss in the wires if you try to power Seattle from solar in Nevada -- not very eco-friendly, you'd agree? Also the extreme heat destroys solar panels. Also, dust. Also the permitting of stuff across state lines is so time-consuming it's effectively illegal.
There are a lot of very good reasons why we haven't covered the desert in solar panels.
agnokapathetic · 6h ago
> Electrical signal attenuation increases with the square of the distance
not true. in standard HV-AC lines, power losses are ~10% per megameter. HVDC gets to 3-5%. So Nevada to Seattle would be at most 20% loss, and in practice 15%, and with HVDC closer to 7%.
I have no dog in this fight, but this is so impressive it sounds wrong. I don’t think it is wrong, I’m just really blown away
yndoendo · 2h ago
"Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet" by Varun Sivaram [0] is a good source on ways to improve renewable energy from infrastructure design changes. He talks about the HVDC longitude runs that would improve transfer of electricity to areas that may be cloudy where it is sunny during peak.
My point of view with Tesla vs Edison is that they were both right and wrong under select circumstances.
This is where you picture an expanding wireless sphere of transmission from a point source and since the surface area of this sphere grows by the square of the distance you get this "power attenuates by the square of the distance" rule.
This of course doesn't apply to power over a 2D cable.
Aurornis · 5h ago
> Electrical signal attenuation increases with the square of the distance
Power transmission lines at 60Hz primarily have ohmic losses, which are linear with length of the conductor.
Interesting fact - Power transmission lines are long enough that the capacitive and inductive effects do matter a little bit, even though it's only 60Hz. That's why spacing between conductors is important. 3-phase lines will also rotate the order of conductors every so often to keep the average spacing between all pairs of lines similar.
vizzier · 5h ago
The mind boggles at how many little bits of information like this keep our world running smoothly...
strongpigeon · 6h ago
> As a rule, if you're tempted to begin any sentence with "they should just..." -- don't.
Strongly agreed.
> Electrical signal attenuation increases with the square of the distance, so you'll lose ~95% of the power to heat loss in the wires if you try to power Seattle from solar in Nevada
What? HVDC lines are usually estimated to have 3.5% power loss per 1000 km. Since power transmission is done using power lines, the inverse square law doesn't really apply here.
> There are a lot of very good reasons why we haven't covered the desert in solar panels.
That does remain true however. Cost concerns, grid access concerns, environmental concerns are all good reasons.
badc0ffee · 4h ago
Confidently, impressively wrong. Imagine how the power grid would work if there were 95% losses over 900 km.
Rebelgecko · 6h ago
Seattle is fine on power, you can pave the parts of the Mojave in California to power California instead (although tbh I think what we need most in CA is storage for when the sun goes down).
I think you can also reduce heat loss by cranking the voltage up, right? I imagine that's how current interstate/cross-country power deals work
downrightmike · 5h ago
Bigger interstate wires hold more power and have a much higher thermal mass, which is fine until someone's tree shorts everything out because lines sag greatly with more heat/power
IncreasePosts · 5h ago
I think you're over estimating losses for high voltage transmission lines. It's "only" 800 miles from the Mojave to seattle.
In China there is a high voltage transmission line over 2000 miles long
derefr · 5h ago
I'll ignore your other points, because sibling comments are addressing them better. So here's something more unique:
> Also the permitting of stuff across state lines is so time-consuming it's effectively illegal.
This is true in general, but in this specific case, there are a lot of obvious ways to get around the problem, because Nevada is a moth-eaten shirt of federal land reservations — Nevada-the-political-entity only owns/regulates ~15% of the land of Nevada-the-geographic-territory.
With the current state of the US federal government, lobbying to privately use one of those federal reservations would be a walk in the park; and once you're going "California -> federal land" instead of "Calfornia -> Nevada", regulation gets a lot simpler.
Fun fact: there's a National Forest in Nye County (bordering California) that runs right up to the edge of the DoE-reserved area where they did the nuke tests. The feds are fine with running HVDC lines through National Forests (they're not Parks, after all), and "repurposing nuked ground for solar" is actually an easy-to-sell narrative at all levels. You could build solar there and backhaul it to California without ever touching land regulated by Nevada-the-political-entity.
amanaplanacanal · 6h ago
Seattle isn't a good example, as they have been carbon neutral since 2005. They have lots of hydro power in the Pacific Northwest.
dwedge · 6h ago
Paving deserts with black heat absorbers that are only 10-20% efficient in converting that energy to electricity could well end up affecting climate more than burning coal would
glenstein · 5h ago
1% from a Dyson Sphere would be a better energy return than 100% efficiency from any conventional energy sorce. Similarly, 20% from solar is competitive with 60% from nuclear, 50% from coal, and is easily better than 100% from my neighbor Dan riding a bicycle powered electricity generator.
You can't cite efficiency percentages in a vacuum to imply they are a better or worse than alternatives, because those aren't percentages of the same kinds of things, and they don't tell you about the economics, production in absolute terms or EROEI.
Ardon · 5h ago
The solar panels would overheat (and lose efficiency), since ~80% of the solar energy hitting it is absorbed as (mostly) heat.
Generating solar energy in deserts is often done with a mirror based heating system for this reason.
glenstein · 3h ago
Something like 98-99% installed solar capacity in the American southwest is traditional PV. Mirrors are there, and they're awesome, but PV dominates.
PV are designed to account for heat and "less efficiency" means they risk performing at 17-18% instead of 20%. And it's actually generating more total energy at 18% because more total sunlight is hitting it, an advantage in desserts.
Ardon · 2h ago
Yeah that's true.
I was thinking more long term though, deserts see much faster yearly degradation than places with more normal temps. (up to 2-3% compared to the standard 0.5-0.8%)
That's just an economic factor rather than a blocker. PVs are cheap as right now, and could be even cheaper if they weren't tariffed. I wouldn't be surprised if PVs in the desert is nonetheless the right approach right now, and not concentrators.
easygenes · 5h ago
Definitely not. At global scale, the offset effects of solar installations outweigh albedo effects on the order of about 30x. [0][1]
Amazon claimed their energy usage was "matched with 100% renewable energy" in 2023, while Google's goal is to actually "run on 24/7 carbon-free energy".
Google already claims to have matched 100% of their energy with renewables since 2017.
deelowe · 5h ago
Carbon offsets are not the same as being carbon neutral.
mullingitover · 7h ago
Meanwhile China is on track to install as much solar power in the past year as the US has in its entire history. The US has maintained steep tariffs on solar panels.
Clean energy isn't even some virtuous thing, it's just no-brainer smart energy policy. The only reason for Google to be backpedaling on its pledge is political. It's in a backsliding petrostate and it has to play the political game.
nsoonhui · 1h ago
>> The only reason for Google to be backpedaling on its pledge is political. It's in a backsliding petrostate and it has to play the political game.
What evidence you have to justify your accusation?
From another poster here
Now, in their 2025 Environmental Report at https://sustainability.google/reports/google-2025-environmen...:
"We aim to run on 24/7 carbon-free energy on every grid where we operate by 2030." and "We aim to reduce absolute, combined scope 1, 2 (market-based), and 3 emissions by 50% from a 2019 base year by 2030." (They also restate the thing about "to neutralize our remaining emissions" a bit later in the document.)
So I would say you need to backup your claim _really_ well instead of just interpreting things in the worst way possible according to your imagination.
mullingitover · 26m ago
Yes, we all read the article and nobody's disputing that Google hasn't removed the pledge, just made it less visible. I'm just giving my interpretation.
We also all saw Sundar being paraded around like a prisoner of war at the inauguration (to be generous, another interpretation being that he is an enthusiastic collaborator in a despotic regime). He's clearly involved politically in this regime, and they have made their stance on clean energy clear. To be willfully blind to that reality is simply a choice I'm not making.
ActorNightly · 6h ago
Not so much political as strategic. If nobody else has to make efforts for sustainability, its a "pointless" investment (in the sense that the current shareholders don't really care that much about future over returns within their lifespans)
worik · 4h ago
> If nobody else has to make efforts for sustainability, its a "pointless" investment
No. That is not true
* Unless you are evil using school yard excuses is off brand. You do the right thing
* Carbon free energy is cheaper to produce these days, so the premis is wrong
This politics. Burn the planet, it is what Trump would do
murderfs · 3h ago
> * Carbon free energy is cheaper to produce these days, so the premis is wrong
If it's cheaper to produce, then there's no point in doing anything special, because it'll just take over via market forces. The "problem" with renewables is that the economics are fantastic in the marginal case, but if you need it to take over baseload when the sun is down, wind isn't blowing, etc., it's much more expensive because you need to build energy storage, which fossil fuel generators get for free. Going from 50% of power generation to 100% is going to be many multiples more expensive than 0% to 50%.
Until things like flow batteries become economical, in places without rivers you can dam for generation/pumped storage, it's probably not going to be feasible to go 0% carbon unless you just replace all of your baseload generation with nuclear or something.
mullingitover · 3h ago
> If it's cheaper to produce, then there's no point in doing anything special, because it'll just take over via market forces.
It is taking over via market forces. New utility-scale solar+battery capacity is already cheaper than building a new coal plant.
The only reason it's not doing it more quickly is because of government intervention in the markets in the US to nerf it.
dfxm12 · 7h ago
Is there evidence that they are doing this to appease Trump? What if they wanted to do this anyway and recognize that at this time, they can use appeasement as a weaselly way to justify it.
wcunning · 7h ago
There has been a move to get the FTC to start labeling these net carbon numbers as misleading advertising because it always includes a bunch of purchased offsets unrelated to the company. Further, there have been some real and complicated situations where carbon credits were sold more than the actual amount of offset carbon -- meaning for example BigCorpA and BigCorpB buy the same "green energy infra" credits from projects that are in construction and then never actually meet their listed goals, but both companies claim to be carbon neutral because of the claims for several years before that comes out. Matt Levine had a very interesting column on forestry in the US Southeast talking about places getting paid to not cut down trees far in excess of the number of trees that could realistically be harvested. Google might be frontrunning some of those arguments. Or might have done the real audit of the claims and realized that they had been less carbon offset than they thought, so safer to just pull the whole pledge at least in the short term.
Muromec · 6h ago
>There has been a move to get the FTC to start labeling these net carbon numbers as misleading advertising because it always includes a bunch of purchased offsets unrelated to the company
Which is good, because carbon offset are a scam.
mullingitover · 6h ago
Cap and trade is a perfectly sound strategy for reducing carbon emissions, and carbon offsets are valid part of the 'trade.' There's the potential for fraud, but fraud can happen anywhere and there's nothing special about carbon offsets that makes them entirely fraudulent. The market and regulators have already been accounting for this through third party verification.
Now, if you are a fossil fuel megacorp and want to burn the entire cap and trade system to the ground, creating a 'carbon offsets are a scam' meme and destroying the 'trade' side is a great way to manufacture consent to get rid of that pesky 'cap.'
abdullahkhalids · 6h ago
> there's nothing special about carbon offsets that makes them entirely fraudulent
The problem is that what gets exchanged in the marked is a certificate but the purpose of the market is to create a positive externality. This means the buyers and sellers don't have an inventive to be honest.
The buyer of the carbon credits doesn't actually need the carbon to be captured. They just want a certificate for X credits, so they can emit elsewhere or get some other benefit.
The seller doesn't actually need to capture the carbon. As long as they can make a convincing enough case to the buyer that they did capture the carbon, the buyer is happy to buy.
This is unlike a typical market where the seller does have an incentive to fool the buyers into a buying a subpar product, but the buyer has a lot of economic incentive to actually not be fooled.
nostrademons · 4h ago
There are 3rd-party enforcement mechanisms. It's not as simple as the seller saying "We don't pollute, trust us"; there are actual government inspectors and NGO delegates that go out, visit factories, and fine them if their actual emissions don't match the declared permits:
The bigger issue, as mentioned above, is that there's often a time lag between when the seller receives the money and when the seller can actually put it to use to reduce carbon emissions. One of the biggest sellers of carbon credits, for instance, is CA high-speed rail, which is decades away from completion. If it doesn't actually complete, it's not going to take any cars off the road or planes out of the sky, and so all the carbon credits it sold would just allow fossil fuel emitters to maintain status-quo emissions.
But as a way of diverting private resources from CO2 emitters to greener alternatives, cap & trade has been pretty effective. Over half the cars in my Bay Area city are now EVs; Tesla was kept afloat for many years by selling carbon credits.
Muromec · 5h ago
This. Both parties in the market are in on the same scam to fool the end customer and shareholders
Muromec · 5h ago
Its a scam as long as emitting CO2 and then buying credits doesnt result in capturing the emitted amount from the athmosphere, yet allows one to claim net neitrality in a market where customers are somewhat critical
Filligree · 7h ago
Who would want to? Solar power is cheaper than any alternative, so long as you’re allowed to use it.
HardCodedBias · 6h ago
Solar power is much more expensive if the power must adhere to some number of 9's of reliability.
Often data centers need to run at three nines of availability (ie: 99.9) and at that level of availability the price of solar power is many multiples of conventional power due to the cost of batteries and over provisioning.
adgjlsfhk1 · 5h ago
this is not true. solar+battery+natural gas backup is cheaper than any other form of power by a lot.
nostrademons · 4h ago
Hydro is cheaper, if you have access to it. That (and cooling) is why many data centers are built next to rivers like The Dalles.
But your point otherwise stands; solar + battery is cheaper than any fossil fuel form of power.
dpkirchner · 7h ago
I'm not sure we're going to find a smoking gun here -- like an executive saying this was removed because it made MAGAs irrationally angry, say.
No comments yet
lawlessone · 7h ago
Probably both really.
photochemsyn · 6h ago
Another very real reason is that GOOGL's top five major institutional shareholders are the same as Exxon's (XOM). Now, what happens to American fossil fuel corporate value if this AI data center boom is built on the back of solar/wind/storage upgrades to the US electrical grid? That would reduce natural gas demand, not increase it.
Another option for powering data centers is small modular nuclear - but again, China is far ahead on that with the helium-cooled pebble-bed model, although it really seems optimized for high-temp industrial process steam generation over electricity at present - so no, cheap safe nuclear power is not coming to the USA anytime soon.
Certainly, Trump's vitriol on wind power and solar power could mean a loss of government contract opportunities for AI-centric firms that promote such energy source - but still, the tariffs on China's monoocrystalline PV panels go back a decade and are just as supported by both political parties, because the major donors to both parties see renewable energy as a threat to their profit margins, be they on the executive or the shareholders side of the equation.
The kerosene lamp manufacturers don't want to be replaced with electric lightbulbs. This kind of monopolistic investor capitalism always stifles innovation and progress - all they see is the losses from collapsing demand for fossil fuels, and if the raw inputs are solar and wind instead of oil and gas, it's harder to collect rents.
yieldcrv · 7h ago
> The US has maintained steep tariffs on solar panels.
Because the US should be doing it domestically, just like China is.
The incentive to do is partially based on tariffs, but the incentive hasn't spurred the private sector and supply chain maintainers into action, and a more comprehensive strategy would need to be done. There is no consensus for further subsidies from the national government to spur this production either.
mullingitover · 7h ago
The argument for tariffs on China's panels is that they're dumping.
However, really the answer to dumping is to exploit the dumper viciously, buy as much below market rate product of theirs as you can while they bleed money (especially a capital good like solar panels).
The US could be driving down the cost of energy nationwide with the dumped power generation equipment. Lower cost energy could then be turbocharging (nearly) every other industry in the country.
The only industry this harms is fossil fuels, and solar is being hamstrung to protect this legacy industry at the cost of all potential future industries.
Previously, on https://sustainability.google/operating-sustainably/:
"We've set a goal to achieve net-zero emissions across all of our operations and value chain by 2030." and, in a table later, "Reduce 50% of our combined Scope 1, 2 (market-based), and 3 absolute emissions by 2030. Invest in nature-based and technology-based carbon removal solutions to neutralize our remaining emissions." and "Run on 24/7 carbon-free energy on every grid where we operate by 2030."
Now, in their 2025 Environmental Report at https://sustainability.google/reports/google-2025-environmen...:
"We aim to run on 24/7 carbon-free energy on every grid where we operate by 2030." and "We aim to reduce absolute, combined scope 1, 2 (market-based), and 3 emissions by 50% from a 2019 base year by 2030." (They also restate the thing about "to neutralize our remaining emissions" a bit later in the document.)
Exactly the same stated goals, just written in a different place. There's more hedging around it now: they call it a "moonshot" and say that they might not manage it, but they never actually promised to do it before.
if it's a serious committment to being carbon-free, i think this sounds like a positive change. if it's a moonshot that they have no real intention of actually meeting, then it's a lot less impressive. i guess we'll see...
Not necessarily. In the UK the market for zero-emission electricity is separated from the actual electricity itself. So you basically sell the "greenness" of the electricity separately from the electricity itself. Customers who want green electricity buy the electricity, and buy some "greenness" (called a REGO).
It does make sense, and a lot of people claim it's some kind of scam when it really isn't... But it does make the relationship between the consumption and production of green energy more complex.
For example, suppose 10% of power comes from green energy, but only 5% of people care about it remotely. The market value of a REGO is basically zero. Even if the number of people who care about green energy doubles to 10%, there's still perfect supply so the market value is still zero and it won't have any effect on green energy production. That isn't quite the case but it doesn't seem far off - I couldn't find up-to-date numbers but it seems like the market price of REGOs is on the order of £5-15/MWh, which is very low. Probably because the UK's energy mix is actually very green these days.
No idea how common this system is in other countries.
If you are connected to the grid, the power you use is effectively generated by the power plant with the highest marginal costs. That often means fossil fuels. It doesn't matter whether you are buying generic power from the grid, or if you have a contract stating that the power you use is generated by renewables or nuclear. If you disconnect from the grid, the overall demand goes down, and some of the most expensive generation capacity is no longer needed.
In the long term, if there are many customers buying explicitly carbon-free power from the grid, it may increase the construction of new carbon-free generation capacity. But that effect is difficult to quantify.
Look at those numbers. 100% still is a very ambitious goal. Currently 0 global customers are buying 24/7 carbon free power from the grid, and even getting from 0 to 1 will require a lot of boots on the ground building real infrastructure. Afterwards, getting from 1 to [everyone] is just a matter of scale.
Even the "lazy" strategy of buying up capacity from existing nuclear plants requires outbidding the existing customers (if the law allows it), and only works in regions where nuclear plants actually exist.
It was a byproduct of the EU habit to create markets and competition where they don't naturally exist. You can buy electricity from any power company, and that company can then generate it itself or buy it from the market. Once you have a market like that, it's easy to add requirements such as carbon-free power. As long as the fraction of the market buying indulgences is lower than the share of the power generation meeting the requirements, fulfilling them is essentially free.
Okay, let's ignore "most of the time" and focus on times when carbon-free power was more expensive. Were these companies actually footing the bill in that case? Because increasing the marginal funding toward clean sources when the grid is dirtiest is the whole point.
In any case, carbon-free power from the grid is mostly a legal/financial construct with limited real-world impact. When the grid is dirtiest, market prices are set by fossil fuels with high marginal costs, and clean sources get the same price without any tricks.
If I emit 5g of CO2 but purchase similar in offsets - the offsets have to achieve a reduction of 5g unless something like a scam is going on.
Sometimes, the carbon offsets are from projects that would be built anyway, and there is a lot of sketchiness all around.
It might be better than nothing or it might empower companies to pollute more and then say, "Look, we are offsetting all this!"
the classic example is landowners selling offsets for the mature forests on their land - that's good! and incentivising the preservation of forests is good! but that forest already existed, and has existed for hundreds of years, so does it really make sense that some company can count it against their carbon emissions and claim to be "net zero" just because they paid a landowner to not cut it down?
it makes the whole concept of offsets less of an overall pure good than emitters simply not emitting carbon in the first place, because that is actually a very simple and clear calculation.
If you buy a 1 GWh block of wind/solar energy for a month, you're not doing anything to supply clean energy when it's dark and the wind isn't blowing.
"24/7 carbon free" means increasing the time resolution from 1 month to 1 hour, and funding projects that deliver clean energy when you're actually using it. This includes stuff like batteries, nuclear, and geothermal.
You don't need climate pledges when the thing you're pledging to do saves you substantial amounts of money, and we really don't need quite so much climate moralizing when now the transition to carbon free electricity seems obvious, inevitable, and imminent because of direct immediate cost.
Now the question is just how can we accelerate this a little without creating false economies or distorting the market too much, just a small incentive here and penalty there along with funding for big projects to make them happen earlier.
That's precisely why a 24/7 goal matters. Energy is already cheap and clean for a large portion of the day, but covering the rest of the day will require significant investment.
There are a few residential utilities in Australia which give users free electricity for 3 hours a day to encourage users to divert their usage to that period.
Widespread solar deployment significantly changes the electricity market. Further deployment is going to push fossil plants to charge higher rates when they're needed to the point where supply outstrips demand and it becomes cheaper to shut down a plant which will further increase overnight prices.
If China can pave mountains, a little desert with caliche should be easy
Electrical signal attenuation increases with the square of the distance, so you'll lose ~95% of the power to heat loss in the wires if you try to power Seattle from solar in Nevada -- not very eco-friendly, you'd agree? Also the extreme heat destroys solar panels. Also, dust. Also the permitting of stuff across state lines is so time-consuming it's effectively illegal.
There are a lot of very good reasons why we haven't covered the desert in solar panels.
not true. in standard HV-AC lines, power losses are ~10% per megameter. HVDC gets to 3-5%. So Nevada to Seattle would be at most 20% loss, and in practice 15%, and with HVDC closer to 7%.
https://www.nationalgrid.com/sites/default/files/documents/1...
My point of view with Tesla vs Edison is that they were both right and wrong under select circumstances.
[0] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262537070/taming-the-sun/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law
This is where you picture an expanding wireless sphere of transmission from a point source and since the surface area of this sphere grows by the square of the distance you get this "power attenuates by the square of the distance" rule.
This of course doesn't apply to power over a 2D cable.
Power transmission lines at 60Hz primarily have ohmic losses, which are linear with length of the conductor.
Interesting fact - Power transmission lines are long enough that the capacitive and inductive effects do matter a little bit, even though it's only 60Hz. That's why spacing between conductors is important. 3-phase lines will also rotate the order of conductors every so often to keep the average spacing between all pairs of lines similar.
Strongly agreed.
> Electrical signal attenuation increases with the square of the distance, so you'll lose ~95% of the power to heat loss in the wires if you try to power Seattle from solar in Nevada
What? HVDC lines are usually estimated to have 3.5% power loss per 1000 km. Since power transmission is done using power lines, the inverse square law doesn't really apply here.
> There are a lot of very good reasons why we haven't covered the desert in solar panels.
That does remain true however. Cost concerns, grid access concerns, environmental concerns are all good reasons.
I think you can also reduce heat loss by cranking the voltage up, right? I imagine that's how current interstate/cross-country power deals work
> Also the permitting of stuff across state lines is so time-consuming it's effectively illegal.
This is true in general, but in this specific case, there are a lot of obvious ways to get around the problem, because Nevada is a moth-eaten shirt of federal land reservations — Nevada-the-political-entity only owns/regulates ~15% of the land of Nevada-the-geographic-territory.
With the current state of the US federal government, lobbying to privately use one of those federal reservations would be a walk in the park; and once you're going "California -> federal land" instead of "Calfornia -> Nevada", regulation gets a lot simpler.
Fun fact: there's a National Forest in Nye County (bordering California) that runs right up to the edge of the DoE-reserved area where they did the nuke tests. The feds are fine with running HVDC lines through National Forests (they're not Parks, after all), and "repurposing nuked ground for solar" is actually an easy-to-sell narrative at all levels. You could build solar there and backhaul it to California without ever touching land regulated by Nevada-the-political-entity.
You can't cite efficiency percentages in a vacuum to imply they are a better or worse than alternatives, because those aren't percentages of the same kinds of things, and they don't tell you about the economics, production in absolute terms or EROEI.
Generating solar energy in deserts is often done with a mirror based heating system for this reason.
PV are designed to account for heat and "less efficiency" means they risk performing at 17-18% instead of 20%. And it's actually generating more total energy at 18% because more total sunlight is hitting it, an advantage in desserts.
I was thinking more long term though, deserts see much faster yearly degradation than places with more normal temps. (up to 2-3% compared to the standard 0.5-0.8%)
That's just an economic factor rather than a blocker. PVs are cheap as right now, and could be even cheaper if they weren't tariffed. I wouldn't be surprised if PVs in the desert is nonetheless the right approach right now, and not concentrators.
Coal starts with pulling down entire mountains to get to the coal. The whole process starts with environmental destruction and that's how it ends.
The thermal mass of the panels is no where near significant. Especially compared to a run away greenhouse effect we know coal to cause.
This is reasonable, it's a nearly impossible goal to achieve.
Meanwhile: "Amazon meets 100% renewable energy goal 7 years early"[1]
[1] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/sustainability/amazon-renew...
Google already claims to have matched 100% of their energy with renewables since 2017.
Clean energy isn't even some virtuous thing, it's just no-brainer smart energy policy. The only reason for Google to be backpedaling on its pledge is political. It's in a backsliding petrostate and it has to play the political game.
What evidence you have to justify your accusation?
From another poster here
So I would say you need to backup your claim _really_ well instead of just interpreting things in the worst way possible according to your imagination.We also all saw Sundar being paraded around like a prisoner of war at the inauguration (to be generous, another interpretation being that he is an enthusiastic collaborator in a despotic regime). He's clearly involved politically in this regime, and they have made their stance on clean energy clear. To be willfully blind to that reality is simply a choice I'm not making.
No. That is not true
* Unless you are evil using school yard excuses is off brand. You do the right thing
* Carbon free energy is cheaper to produce these days, so the premis is wrong
This politics. Burn the planet, it is what Trump would do
If it's cheaper to produce, then there's no point in doing anything special, because it'll just take over via market forces. The "problem" with renewables is that the economics are fantastic in the marginal case, but if you need it to take over baseload when the sun is down, wind isn't blowing, etc., it's much more expensive because you need to build energy storage, which fossil fuel generators get for free. Going from 50% of power generation to 100% is going to be many multiples more expensive than 0% to 50%.
Until things like flow batteries become economical, in places without rivers you can dam for generation/pumped storage, it's probably not going to be feasible to go 0% carbon unless you just replace all of your baseload generation with nuclear or something.
It is taking over via market forces. New utility-scale solar+battery capacity is already cheaper than building a new coal plant.
The only reason it's not doing it more quickly is because of government intervention in the markets in the US to nerf it.
Which is good, because carbon offset are a scam.
Now, if you are a fossil fuel megacorp and want to burn the entire cap and trade system to the ground, creating a 'carbon offsets are a scam' meme and destroying the 'trade' side is a great way to manufacture consent to get rid of that pesky 'cap.'
The problem is that what gets exchanged in the marked is a certificate but the purpose of the market is to create a positive externality. This means the buyers and sellers don't have an inventive to be honest.
The buyer of the carbon credits doesn't actually need the carbon to be captured. They just want a certificate for X credits, so they can emit elsewhere or get some other benefit.
The seller doesn't actually need to capture the carbon. As long as they can make a convincing enough case to the buyer that they did capture the carbon, the buyer is happy to buy.
This is unlike a typical market where the seller does have an incentive to fool the buyers into a buying a subpar product, but the buyer has a lot of economic incentive to actually not be fooled.
https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/resources/documents/mrr-enforcement
The bigger issue, as mentioned above, is that there's often a time lag between when the seller receives the money and when the seller can actually put it to use to reduce carbon emissions. One of the biggest sellers of carbon credits, for instance, is CA high-speed rail, which is decades away from completion. If it doesn't actually complete, it's not going to take any cars off the road or planes out of the sky, and so all the carbon credits it sold would just allow fossil fuel emitters to maintain status-quo emissions.
But as a way of diverting private resources from CO2 emitters to greener alternatives, cap & trade has been pretty effective. Over half the cars in my Bay Area city are now EVs; Tesla was kept afloat for many years by selling carbon credits.
Often data centers need to run at three nines of availability (ie: 99.9) and at that level of availability the price of solar power is many multiples of conventional power due to the cost of batteries and over provisioning.
But your point otherwise stands; solar + battery is cheaper than any fossil fuel form of power.
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Another option for powering data centers is small modular nuclear - but again, China is far ahead on that with the helium-cooled pebble-bed model, although it really seems optimized for high-temp industrial process steam generation over electricity at present - so no, cheap safe nuclear power is not coming to the USA anytime soon.
Certainly, Trump's vitriol on wind power and solar power could mean a loss of government contract opportunities for AI-centric firms that promote such energy source - but still, the tariffs on China's monoocrystalline PV panels go back a decade and are just as supported by both political parties, because the major donors to both parties see renewable energy as a threat to their profit margins, be they on the executive or the shareholders side of the equation.
The kerosene lamp manufacturers don't want to be replaced with electric lightbulbs. This kind of monopolistic investor capitalism always stifles innovation and progress - all they see is the losses from collapsing demand for fossil fuels, and if the raw inputs are solar and wind instead of oil and gas, it's harder to collect rents.
Because the US should be doing it domestically, just like China is.
The incentive to do is partially based on tariffs, but the incentive hasn't spurred the private sector and supply chain maintainers into action, and a more comprehensive strategy would need to be done. There is no consensus for further subsidies from the national government to spur this production either.
However, really the answer to dumping is to exploit the dumper viciously, buy as much below market rate product of theirs as you can while they bleed money (especially a capital good like solar panels).
The US could be driving down the cost of energy nationwide with the dumped power generation equipment. Lower cost energy could then be turbocharging (nearly) every other industry in the country.
The only industry this harms is fossil fuels, and solar is being hamstrung to protect this legacy industry at the cost of all potential future industries.