Google Biggest Buyer of Renewables

Google's total purchase of energy from renewable sources in 2017 was greater than the electricity used by its global operations, the tech giant has said. This follows a 2016 announcement that the business was on target to buy enough renewable energy to "match" electricity usage. In a blog post on Wednesday, Google's Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure Urs Holzle described what the business meant by "matching". Put simply, for every kilowatt hour of electricity the company used in 2017, it bought a kilowatt hour of renewable energy from a solar or wind farm built specifically for Google, CNBC reported. Holzle said Google now had contracts to buy 3 gigawatts of output from renewable energy projects and that no corporate purchaser was buying more renewable energy than Google. "Renewable energy contracts for Google had resulted in more than $3 billion in new capital investment across the globe," he said.