Google and Siemens Recent Efforts To Improve Green Energy 

Five years ago, Google announced that it wanted to become carbon neutral. That's a big task, given the number of datacenters Google owns. Overall, the company says it already uses renewable energy for 33% of its total electricity—13% of it bought directly by Google, 20% of it from renewable energy already available in the grid. In fact, the company says if its renewable energy and offsets are taken into account it already has a zero carbon footprint. Including its recent $200 million investment in the Spinning Spur Wind Farm, it has committed over $1 billion to wind and solar projects.

The company says its datacenters use just half the energy of most other datacenters. It says its datacenters are so efficient that feeding Youtube videos to customers for a week uses less energy than it takes to do a load of laundry.

Siemens 75-m rotor blade for 154-m turbine

Siemens, meanwhile, is working on building better wind turbines. Its latest SWT-6.0-154 has half the moving parts than comparable geared machines and low weight to cut infrastructure, installation and servicing costs, and increasing lifetime energy output.

In a commentary over at Design News, contributing editor Cabe Atwell, gives kudos to both companies for making significant progress in moving the world toward the use of more renewable energy.

He lists some of the two companies' major accomplishments:

Google:

Signed 20-year agreements with renewable energy suppliers NextEra and Minco, which will provide power for Google datacenters in Iowa and Oklahoma, respectively.

Invested $94 million in Canadian Hills solar power project in Oklahoma to power datacenters there.

Spent $75 million to build a 50 MW wind farm in Rippey, Iowa, some to power Google datacenters, the rest for 15,000 homes.

Siemens:

Finished year long test on the largest wind-swept area wind turbine ever made. The prototype has a 120-meter rotor, while the commercial version (the SWT-6.0-154) will have a 154-meter rotor. Each turbine will produce up to 6 W of power. The turbines are gearless, tand he single-cast blades are 20% lighter than traditional blades.

The UK government is likely to play a role in Danish company Dong Energy's tests of the new system in that country. It has also invested $120 billion in the industry.