Google: Google's new 'green campus': What it is and what it means for the future of Google

Google’s new Bay View campus, located east of the tech giant’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, will reportedly be opened to a select number of employees by January and is reportedly a representative of the company’s wider goals and vision. According to Google, the campus itself is a microcosm for what it hopes to achieve on a broader scale sustainability-wise and is fuelled by solar panels and geothermal energy.

Google certainly does need to make significant efforts to reduce its data centers’ impact, considering that they accounted for 15.1 million megawatt-hours of its electricity consumption last year.

According to Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and its parent company Alphabet Inc, said that by 2030, Google aims to power all of its offices and data centres with sustainable energy every day, all day. Many have argued that this is one of the most ambitious decarbonization pledges out there. Already, last year, the tech giant was able to power 67% of its hourly data centre power demands with renewable energy sources - although this is just a 6% increase from the year prior. On a smaller scale, some of its data centers are nearly 100% green, such as those in Oklahoma and Oregon, but undeniably, as with the rest of tech, Google still has a long way to go.