Ashtabula, one of two North Dakota wind farms to receive investments from Google this week.
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In case anyone was wondering why Google invested $38 million in two North Dakota wind farms this week, it seems to be part of a larger plan. Good Gear Guide explains why Google is becoming an energy trader: not for the sake of being in the business itself, but as a path to reliably increasing its use of renewable energy.
Google Energy received approval in February from the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to trade power on the wholesale market. But Bill Weihl, Google's green energy czar, disputed that the motivation is to become an energy trader. He said, "What we want is the flexibility to manage our power contracts, and in particular be able to sign contracts that are useful to developers and that get more renewables on the grid."
More from Weihl in the Good Gear Guide story:
Google typically buys multiyear power contracts with utility companies, he said, so that it knows what its energy rates will be for the next several years.
"Suppose a developer wants to build a wind farm down the road, we'd love to buy power from that wind farm. But to do so in a way that helps that developer, we would need to sign a power purchase agreement for, say, 10 or 20 years, to allow him to get good financing rates and free up capital for his next project... What the FERC authority allows us to do is turn around and resell that [wind] power until the day comes when we can use it ourselves," Weihl said. "That's fundamentally the type of thing we want to do."
Google has already been praised for helping consumers measure and drive down their own energy consumption with its PowerMeter, and it has mapped out global greenhouse gas emissions information for anyone who wants it, so the wind power investment seems a sign that the company is putting its money where its mouth is.
(No word, though, on whether Google will finally release information on its own carbon footprint.)
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