(May 20): A senior executive at Alphabet Inc.’s Google said the company isn’t abandoning plans to run its business on 24/7 carbon-free energy by 2030, even as the buildout of data centers for AI raises questions about the feasibility of such a goal.
Ben King, Google’s country managing director for Singapore and Malaysia, said the so-called hourly matching goal — whereby electricity consumption is backed by clean energy every hour of every day, in all regions in which the company operates — “remains” in place, in response to questions at a conference in Singapore on Tuesday.
The extent to which hyperscalers are committed to running on clean energy has generated debate in recent weeks after it emerged that Microsoft Corp. may be walking away from its 2030 hourly matching target. Such a step would carry significant emissions ramifications.
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Matching electricity consumption with clean power in the same hour, on the same grid, can cut 42 times more carbon-dioxide emissions compared with only matching it on an annual basis, according to a recent study.
Microsoft said in 2021 it planned to match 100% of its electricity consumption, 100% of the time, with zero-carbon energy purchases (all within the same grid system) by 2030. But the race to power data centers is making it harder for hyperscalers to limit themselves to clean energy, with gas seen as a more convenient alternative.
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Google was the first major company to pledge it would run on 24/7 clean power, having first discussed the idea as far back as 2018. But the company has also referred to hourly matching as a “moonshot” goal, noting the process “is a far more complex and technically challenging goal” than annual targets.
In its latest sustainability report, Google said it used carbon-free energy about two-thirds of the time, on average. In some regions, however, it managed to run offices and data centers on clean power more than 90% of the time.
Other hyperscalers have argued against setting such high standards. Last month, more than 60 companies including Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc. signed a letter asking the Greenhouse Gas Protocol — a widely used carbon accounting standard — not to mandate an hourly matching requirement.
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