Electricity is the driving force behind every aspect of our modern society. As electrification, industrial growth, and digitalization bring new benefits to communities across the world, they’re also bringing new energy requirements. Data centers serve as a crucial backbone to this increasingly interconnected world and have a growing strategic role in how the world meets energy demand. Powering data centers with reliable, affordable, and clean electricity allows the industry to responsibly support the expansion of innovative technologies and services shaping our present day. Furthermore, it is a critical choice that Google is making to enable a more sustainable future.
At Google, our commitment to the transition towards a clean energy future remains central to our sustainable data center operations strategy. From 2010 to 2023, we signed more than 115 agreements to purchase over 14GW of clean energy generation capacity—the equivalent of more than 36 million solar panels. Through these agreements, we estimate that we’ll spend more than 16 billion USD to purchase clean energy through 2040. In 2017, we became the first major company to match 100 percent of our global, annual electricity consumption with renewable energy purchases, and we have continued to accomplish this every year since.
This 100 percent match proved an important milestone, but our experience showed that we needed to go further to fully decarbonize our electricity consumption and accelerate the transition to fully zero-carbon electricity grids. By 2030, Google aims to run our operations on carbon-free energy (CFE) everywhere, at all times. This means purchasing carbon-free energy to match the electricity consumption of our data centers and offices around the world, every hour of every day.
We believe that the significant progress we’ve made should not be kept exclusive or unique to Google—corporate energy buyers everywhere, including other hyperscalers, can collectively play a powerful role in accelerating the global transition to a carbon-free future.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joe Kava is a seasoned engineering and operations executive who most recently served as Vice President of Data Centers at Google for 17 years. Under his leadership, the data center team consistently designed and built infrastructure that not only met current technical requirements but also anticipated future technical trends—all while using the least amount of energy possible. The result: Google’s data centers continue to surpass industry averages for sustainability while driving record-setting business results.
Previously, Kava was an engineering and business operations executive in the semiconductor industry, including serving on the leadership team at Applied Materials for over a decade. This experience would later bolster his ability to understand the entire data center ecosystem, and the digital infrastructure stack—from the chip to the chiller.
Kava has earned numerous awards, including being named an Industry Titan by Interglobix Magazine and one of the 100 most influential industry leaders by Infrastructure Masons. He was the first person not employed by Intel to receive the Craig Barrett award for engineering innovation, and he won the “selfless service” award from Salute, a veteran-owned organization that helps veterans transition into the data center industry.
