7 ms·

Google invests $75M in a 50MW wind farm, total $1B to renewable energy sector

65 points by denzil_correa 14y ago

leeoniya 14y ago
50MW seems pretty significant. if Wikipedia is to be believed, "According to Google their global data center operation electrical power ranges between 500 and 681 megawatts"
- effn 14y ago
  MW is the wrong unit to use for that comparision. TWh/year is more appropriate.
  - haberman 14y ago
    Out of curiosity, why do people use Watt-hours instead of Joules for this purpose?
    - dia80 14y ago
      Which is more practical? A: "Hi, can you please supply us with 50MW for the next 12 hours?" B: "Hi, can you please supply us with 2.16Tj at a rate of 50MW?"
      - kondro 14y ago
        It would be much nicer to get 2.16Tj in a bucket.
    - tomrod 14y ago
      Tradition. Same reason we use centralized banks and sovereign currency instead of bit-coin and other independent currencies, or miles per gallon instead of gallons per mile.
      - westicle 14y ago
        Or for that matter, kilometres per litre.
    - barney54 14y ago
      Joules (or watts) is a measure of capacity. Electricity generating capacity, especially with intermittent sources like wind is almost meaningless. Who cares about capacity if the actual generation is zero. Watt-hours, Megawatt-hours, and terawatt-hours are used because that's the descriptive term of energy actually produced.
  - sp332 14y ago
    I think MW is a reasonable unit. It's the power output of the wind farm.
    - barney54 14y ago
      No. MW-hours is the reasonable unit of power output. MW is a description of the capacity, but it says nothing of actual generation.
      - sp332 14y ago
        I understand the number is an ideal, maximum number, but I'm talking about the units. Are you saying power should be reported in megawatt-hours per year? That might be convenient, but it's the same as megawatt-years per year, which reduces to megawatts which is what I said.
  - ghshephard 14y ago
    MW tells us the scale of the plant. TWh/year tells us the production of the plant. I've got a good gut sense for what a 3 MW wind turbine looks like, so when I read "50 MW Plant" - I can already envision about how large, and about how many turbines it will have (approx 15-30). TWh/year doesn't tell me as much, because the plant might be located in a very windy place. Or maybe not in a windy place at all - the data is still useful, but I prefer MW when people are talking about a plant's "physicality".
- adam-f 14y ago
  It's less significant if you consider that the Capacity Factor of a wind farm is around 20-40% (wikipedia). That comes out to more than 3 dollars per watt.
  - rauljara 14y ago
    You say that as though it's a lot. And it sort of is a lot for an initial investment. But the cost of keeping a wind farm running is a lot lower than the cost of keeping fuel consuming power plants running. This wikipedia page has a bunch of estimates of overall cost per Megawatt Hour that show wind being a slightly cheaper source of energy than conventional coal plants, and considerably cheaper than more advanced coal plants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
  - tomrod 14y ago
    Wind farms, as with solar farms and nuclear energy, have large up-front fixed costs and negligible marginal production costs. If the wind-farm produced _only_ 1 hours worth of energy, then $3.00 per watt would be spot on, as I understand it. Likely the wind-farm will operate a number of years. Let's suppose it produces at 10% capacity for 20 years. That would be equivalent to 100% capacity for 2 years, which would be 50 MW/h * 24 hour/days * 365 days/year * 2 years = 876,000 MW/h So now you have $50 Mill/ 876,000 = $57.08 per MW/h, or $5.7088*10^-5 cents per watt/hour. Now, suppose the capacity is larger or the time lasts longer. The cents continue to fall per watt/hour
    - tomrod 14y ago
      Ach, just realized they invested $75 Million, not $50 Million. Scale up by 50% :D
tvladeck 14y ago
Just so everyone's clear, the reason that Google (along with Chevron, Wells Fargo, and a number of other big companies with large tax liabilities) are investing in renewable energy is to take advantage of the massive tax credits that come with the investment. There simply aren't that many companies with tax liabilities large enough to make investments in tax equity like this attractive, and Google is one of them. So, good for Google. It makes a lot of sense for them to do this and I'm glad to see it happening.
- tomrod 14y ago
  Thank goodness for beneficial tax policies that encourage investment in future technologies!
  - jacoblyles 14y ago
    How do we know whether or not a technology is a "future technology" if it is unprofitable without tax credits? Would car companies have spent millions of engineering hours on hydrogen vehicles if the government didn't pay them to do so in the 00's? Maybe it would have been better for mankind if they didn't. Broad incentives are better than targeted incentives. The government is bad at picking future technologies. See ethanol.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - sophacles 14y ago
      1) Renewable energy is a pretty broad target. 2) Countering ethanol - see the internet.
      - cglace 14y ago
        The goverment invented ARPANET in 1969. IBM and ATT had major labs and were vitally interested in computers talking to one another as early as the late 1950s and early 1960s. Bell Labs invented UNIX in 1969; it made the internet possible. IBM invented FORTRAN and hard drives in 1956. Bell transmitted packet data over lines in 1958. Texas Instruments invented integrated circuits in 1958. In 1961 Leonard Kleinrock published a paper on packet switching networks. Bell Labs made the first modem in 1961. Digital Equipment Corporation produced the first minicomputer in 1964. In 1965 time sharing at MIT and mail command started. Intel began in 1968. The year 1966 saw the first use of fiber optics to carry telephone signals. Yes, the RAND corporation came up with a design for a decentralized network that could continue to communicate in case of a nuclear attack. However, they did not invent all of the technology that makes the internet possible. Also, this is an example of the broken window fallacy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window We can't see what type of internet the market would have made because the resources taken out of private market and given to the defense department.
wpietri 14y ago
This makes me wonder how long a game Google is playing. And how good they are at playing the long game. Does anybody know how well they did on all that dark fiber they were buying up after Bubble 1.0?
startupfounder 14y ago
First, a 50MW farm is only ~25 turbines which is small for industry standards. I have been on top of wind turbines in farms of hundreds of turbines surrounded by other windfarms of the same size. I use to inspect wind turbine blades using Industrial Rope Access. Second, Google benefits a few ways with this and other renewable investments, mainly for the Production Tax Credit or PTC. A federal incentive program to develop the wind energy industry that is equivalent to $02.2 per kWh of production. A 50MW farm running at 30% will produce ~130M kWh per year or $3M/year in PTC. Google is doing three things at once, reducing their tax liability, diversifying their portfolio and advertising the Google Brand. This has nothing to do with powering their own data centers and might even take the focus off of them using dirty energy to power their data centers.
- ajross 14y ago
  I don't understand the last clause. Yes, Google uses "dirty energy" in many data centers because they're connected to grids without direct "clean energy" feeds. But electricity is near-perfectly fungible. If you care about "clean" energy at all, your goal should be increasing the supply anywhere -- what's the difference to an environmentalist if that 50MW goes to a Google-owned data center or just a local housing development? How does it make it "less good" of Google to have built those turbines?
  - bcoates 14y ago
    Electricity isn't very fungible at all, at least across space and time: It is expensive to transport and almost impossible to store. The limiting resource on power production is facilities, not fuel. Any electrical power source that doesn't displace a power plant is a toy.
    - ajross 14y ago
      No, that's a very commonly stated point, and it's completely wrong from the perspective of someone trying to reduce carbon output. Solar usually gets this criticism more than wind, so let's use that: the argument goes that you need enough power generating capacity to handle peak usage, but of course solar only works in the day. So if your peak usage happens at night (it doesn't, but let's assume) then the solar panels have "displaced zero power plants". But who cares? If you have them built, then during the day the solar plants are operating and generating (much cheaper, looking only at marginal costs) power. And the coal and gas plants, by virtue of having higher marginal costs, are idle. And at night the fossil plants fire back up and do what they were doing before. So the net effect, assuming excess solar capacity, is that carbon output has been reduced by a factor of two (actually a bit more than two in practice). And of course then the market will accomodate, such that "day power" being available in higher quantity and with higher excess capacity becomes cheaper and "night power" more expensive. So the legacy coal plants will probably still even make money as they're selling into a "premium" market. So... how is solar (or wind) a toy in that scenario?
jameswilsterman 14y ago
Don't forget about their $5B transmission line as well: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/may/15/energy-wind-google-cable http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/may/15/energy-win... http://gigaom.com/cleantech/by-the-numbers-googles-offshore-wind-investment/ http://gigaom.com/cleantech/by-the-numbers-googles-offshore-...

65 points by denzil_correa 14y ago

50MW seems pretty significant. if Wikipedia is to be believed, "According to Google their global data center operation electrical power ranges between 500 and 681 megawatts"

effn 14y ago
MW is the wrong unit to use for that comparision. TWh/year is more appropriate.
- haberman 14y ago
  Out of curiosity, why do people use Watt-hours instead of Joules for this purpose?
  - dia80 14y ago
    Which is more practical? A: "Hi, can you please supply us with 50MW for the next 12 hours?" B: "Hi, can you please supply us with 2.16Tj at a rate of 50MW?"
    - kondro 14y ago
      It would be much nicer to get 2.16Tj in a bucket.
  - tomrod 14y ago
    Tradition. Same reason we use centralized banks and sovereign currency instead of bit-coin and other independent currencies, or miles per gallon instead of gallons per mile.
    - westicle 14y ago
      Or for that matter, kilometres per litre.
  - barney54 14y ago
    Joules (or watts) is a measure of capacity. Electricity generating capacity, especially with intermittent sources like wind is almost meaningless. Who cares about capacity if the actual generation is zero. Watt-hours, Megawatt-hours, and terawatt-hours are used because that's the descriptive term of energy actually produced.
- sp332 14y ago
  I think MW is a reasonable unit. It's the power output of the wind farm.
  - barney54 14y ago
    No. MW-hours is the reasonable unit of power output. MW is a description of the capacity, but it says nothing of actual generation.
    - sp332 14y ago
      I understand the number is an ideal, maximum number, but I'm talking about the units. Are you saying power should be reported in megawatt-hours per year? That might be convenient, but it's the same as megawatt-years per year, which reduces to megawatts which is what I said.
- ghshephard 14y ago
  MW tells us the scale of the plant. TWh/year tells us the production of the plant. I've got a good gut sense for what a 3 MW wind turbine looks like, so when I read "50 MW Plant" - I can already envision about how large, and about how many turbines it will have (approx 15-30). TWh/year doesn't tell me as much, because the plant might be located in a very windy place. Or maybe not in a windy place at all - the data is still useful, but I prefer MW when people are talking about a plant's "physicality".
adam-f 14y ago
It's less significant if you consider that the Capacity Factor of a wind farm is around 20-40% (wikipedia). That comes out to more than 3 dollars per watt.
- rauljara 14y ago
  You say that as though it's a lot. And it sort of is a lot for an initial investment. But the cost of keeping a wind farm running is a lot lower than the cost of keeping fuel consuming power plants running. This wikipedia page has a bunch of estimates of overall cost per Megawatt Hour that show wind being a slightly cheaper source of energy than conventional coal plants, and considerably cheaper than more advanced coal plants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
- tomrod 14y ago
  Wind farms, as with solar farms and nuclear energy, have large up-front fixed costs and negligible marginal production costs. If the wind-farm produced _only_ 1 hours worth of energy, then $3.00 per watt would be spot on, as I understand it. Likely the wind-farm will operate a number of years. Let's suppose it produces at 10% capacity for 20 years. That would be equivalent to 100% capacity for 2 years, which would be 50 MW/h * 24 hour/days * 365 days/year * 2 years = 876,000 MW/h So now you have $50 Mill/ 876,000 = $57.08 per MW/h, or $5.7088*10^-5 cents per watt/hour. Now, suppose the capacity is larger or the time lasts longer. The cents continue to fall per watt/hour
  - tomrod 14y ago
    Ach, just realized they invested $75 Million, not $50 Million. Scale up by 50% :D

tvladeck 14y ago

Just so everyone's clear, the reason that Google (along with Chevron, Wells Fargo, and a number of other big companies with large tax liabilities) are investing in renewable energy is to take advantage of the massive tax credits that come with the investment. There simply aren't that many companies with tax liabilities large enough to make investments in tax equity like this attractive, and Google is one of them. So, good for Google. It makes a lot of sense for them to do this and I'm glad to see it happening.

tomrod 14y ago
Thank goodness for beneficial tax policies that encourage investment in future technologies!
- jacoblyles 14y ago
  How do we know whether or not a technology is a "future technology" if it is unprofitable without tax credits? Would car companies have spent millions of engineering hours on hydrogen vehicles if the government didn't pay them to do so in the 00's? Maybe it would have been better for mankind if they didn't. Broad incentives are better than targeted incentives. The government is bad at picking future technologies. See ethanol.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - sophacles 14y ago
    1) Renewable energy is a pretty broad target. 2) Countering ethanol - see the internet.
    - cglace 14y ago
      The goverment invented ARPANET in 1969. IBM and ATT had major labs and were vitally interested in computers talking to one another as early as the late 1950s and early 1960s. Bell Labs invented UNIX in 1969; it made the internet possible. IBM invented FORTRAN and hard drives in 1956. Bell transmitted packet data over lines in 1958. Texas Instruments invented integrated circuits in 1958. In 1961 Leonard Kleinrock published a paper on packet switching networks. Bell Labs made the first modem in 1961. Digital Equipment Corporation produced the first minicomputer in 1964. In 1965 time sharing at MIT and mail command started. Intel began in 1968. The year 1966 saw the first use of fiber optics to carry telephone signals. Yes, the RAND corporation came up with a design for a decentralized network that could continue to communicate in case of a nuclear attack. However, they did not invent all of the technology that makes the internet possible. Also, this is an example of the broken window fallacy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window We can't see what type of internet the market would have made because the resources taken out of private market and given to the defense department.

wpietri 14y ago

This makes me wonder how long a game Google is playing. And how good they are at playing the long game. Does anybody know how well they did on all that dark fiber they were buying up after Bubble 1.0?

startupfounder 14y ago

First, a 50MW farm is only ~25 turbines which is small for industry standards. I have been on top of wind turbines in farms of hundreds of turbines surrounded by other windfarms of the same size. I use to inspect wind turbine blades using Industrial Rope Access. Second, Google benefits a few ways with this and other renewable investments, mainly for the Production Tax Credit or PTC. A federal incentive program to develop the wind energy industry that is equivalent to $02.2 per kWh of production. A 50MW farm running at 30% will produce ~130M kWh per year or $3M/year in PTC. Google is doing three things at once, reducing their tax liability, diversifying their portfolio and advertising the Google Brand. This has nothing to do with powering their own data centers and might even take the focus off of them using dirty energy to power their data centers.

ajross 14y ago
I don't understand the last clause. Yes, Google uses "dirty energy" in many data centers because they're connected to grids without direct "clean energy" feeds. But electricity is near-perfectly fungible. If you care about "clean" energy at all, your goal should be increasing the supply anywhere -- what's the difference to an environmentalist if that 50MW goes to a Google-owned data center or just a local housing development? How does it make it "less good" of Google to have built those turbines?
- bcoates 14y ago
  Electricity isn't very fungible at all, at least across space and time: It is expensive to transport and almost impossible to store. The limiting resource on power production is facilities, not fuel. Any electrical power source that doesn't displace a power plant is a toy.
  - ajross 14y ago
    No, that's a very commonly stated point, and it's completely wrong from the perspective of someone trying to reduce carbon output. Solar usually gets this criticism more than wind, so let's use that: the argument goes that you need enough power generating capacity to handle peak usage, but of course solar only works in the day. So if your peak usage happens at night (it doesn't, but let's assume) then the solar panels have "displaced zero power plants". But who cares? If you have them built, then during the day the solar plants are operating and generating (much cheaper, looking only at marginal costs) power. And the coal and gas plants, by virtue of having higher marginal costs, are idle. And at night the fossil plants fire back up and do what they were doing before. So the net effect, assuming excess solar capacity, is that carbon output has been reduced by a factor of two (actually a bit more than two in practice). And of course then the market will accomodate, such that "day power" being available in higher quantity and with higher excess capacity becomes cheaper and "night power" more expensive. So the legacy coal plants will probably still even make money as they're selling into a "premium" market. So... how is solar (or wind) a toy in that scenario?

jameswilsterman 14y ago

Don't forget about their $5B transmission line as well: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/may/15/energy-wind-google-cable http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/may/15/energy-win... http://gigaom.com/cleantech/by-the-numbers-googles-offshore-wind-investment/ http://gigaom.com/cleantech/by-the-numbers-googles-offshore-...