Power Down for the Planet

Hello again!

I was in Mountain View, California, last week visiting the Google campus, a.k.a. the “Google-plex.” It was the first time I’d ever traveled for work by plane, so I felt like a total jet setter! While at Google, I had the opportunity to tour the incredibly innovative campus and meet big names in the green world.

Erik Teetzel, Google’s Energy Program Manager, was my guide during my trip to the Google-plex. Erik and I went behind the scenes at the Google offices to meet a couple of his fellow “Googlers.” They jokingly asked if I was a “New-gler” — a term they use for new employees. I also learned that they call older employees “Grey-glers.” Are you seeing a trend?

While on campus, I had the chance to meet Bill Weihl (yes, THE Bill Weihl), the Green Energy Czar at Google and vice president of the Climate Savers Computing Initiative. Bill, Erik, and I chatted about Google’s involvement with renewable energy projects, which includes two huge wind farms in North Dakota. These farms, believe it or not, produce enough energy to power more than 50,000 homes. These wind farms represent an opportunity for Google to help speed up the widespread use of renewable energy. It will be very cool to see how their renewable energy initiative will grow in the next few years.

As one of the founding members of Climate Savers Computing Initiative, Google is also very dedicated to energy efficient computing. According to Google’s Green Initiatives web page, Google-designed data centers use about half of the energy of a typical data center. This means that the amount of energy used for a Google search is very small. To put it in perspective, it takes the same amount of energy to do 5,100 Google searches as it does to do one load of dishes in an EnergyStar dishwasher. Pretty amazing considering the amount of information that’s being processed in every search!

I also had the rare opportunity to tour the campus with Erik. The Google campus is huge, so I got quite a workout! Luckily for Googlers, there are hundreds of community bikes placed around the campus that keep employees from having to use cars to get around. But, when they need go off campus, they can check out a Google Hybrid. And these aren’t just any hybrids — they are charged by solar panels! You can find footage of this in the video-log of my trip, posted below.

Google’s use of solar panels doesn’t end there; Erik explained that other panels help power nearly 30 percent of the energy needs on campus. Additionally, the main facilities are built with high vaulted ceilings and windows to bring in tons of natural light throughout the day, so office lights don’t always need to be on. And, while working in these innovative buildings, employees can have their meetings inside a company yurt, which have walls stuffed with recycled denim! (For those of you who don’t know, a yurt is a circular domed dwelling that is portable and self-supporting. Thank goodness for free online dictionaries.)

Erik also showed me a few of the 19 cafés around the Google-plex. One of the cafés only uses ingredients that come from within 150 miles of the Google-Plex. Another really cool thing was the on-site organic garden that supplies a portion of the cafés’ produce. Talk about local!

So, at this point, I was already convinced that Google goes to incredible lengths to keep their campus green. Then, I found out about the goats. Instead of using lawn mowers, Google rents goats to come to campus to maintain their grass. Amazing!

Thus, my day at Google came to a close. It was an experience that I will never forget. Thanks to Bill and Erik for meeting with me and for supporting Power Down for the Planet!

But! My trip to the Bay Area didn’t end there. Stay tuned for a post and video of my visit to HP…

P.S. Read more about green initiatives at Google here.