Commercial, Energy Efficiency, GHG Emissions  -  July 3, 2024

Google Reports Increased Emissions

Google announced that its emissions increased by 13% in 2023 and a total of 48% compared to its baseline year of 2019 from increased data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions.

The company explained in an announcement that although they have advanced clean energy on many grids where they operate, Google also operates in certain hard-to-decarbonize regions like Asia-Pacific where carbon-free energy (CFE) isn't readily available. The  company also reported "longer lead times between initial investments and construction of clean energy projects and the resulting GHG reductions from them."

A Google-owned-and-operated data center is, on average, approximately 1.8 times as energy efficient as a typical enterprise data center.

In 2023, the average annual power usage effectiveness for Google's data centers was 1.10 compared with the industry average of 1.58, meaning that its data centers used about 5.8 times less overhead energy for every unit of IT equipment energy.

Google has plans to minimize its environmental footprint and has built efficient infrastructure for the AI era, including Trillium, its sixth-generation Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), which is over 67% more energy-efficient than TPU v5e.

The company also identified tested practices that its research shows can, when used together, lower the energy required to train an AI model by up to 100 times and reduce associated emissions by up to 1,000 times. 

Google says it will advance climate action through AI by adopting fuel-efficient routing that uses AI to analyze traffic, terrain and a vehicle’s engine to suggest the most efficient route. It’s estimated to have helped enable more than 2.9 million metric tons of GHG emissions reductions since the feature launched in late 2021 to the end of 2023.

As detailed in its newly released Environmental Report, the company recently introduced a clean transition rate that brings customers and utilities together to drive new clean energy projects in the U.S., and unveiled an investment to enable 1 gigawatt of new solar capacity in Taiwan.

Google’s goal is to reduce 1 gigaton of carbon equivalent emissions annually by 2030 through its products to help individuals, cities and other partners collectively.

In 2017, Google became the first major company to match 100% of its annual electricity consumption on a global basis with renewable energy, and it has achieved that goal annually.

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