Google Goes Green

You know the Monkeys are suckers for anything green, that’s why we’re so happy to hear about Google’s latest enterprise. Google is replacing a former coal plant with a 350 acre renewable-energy powered server farm in Chattanooga, Alabama. Google data centers are known for using half the energy of a standard data center. The new green data center will be the 14^th for Google.

Google will take over the former power plant’s electric transmission lines to bring in the renewable energy needed to power the new data center. Along with the utility industry, Google is one of the first to buy large amounts of green energy and the largest corporate renewable energy purchaser in the world.

Google will continue with its green initiative within the data center. They have built their own high performance servers that run on as little energy as possible. They have designed their servers to minimize power loss by removing unnecessary parts, as well as using little energy when waiting for a task. Because most of the power is wasted at the power supply, Google has created high efficient voltage regulators to ensure maximum power to the actual computing work. Instead of using chillers to cool their data centers, Google uses water. They use recycled water, as well as rainwater.

Since 2007, Google has remanufactured and repurposed outdated servers to avoid buying over 300,000 new machines.

What do you think about Google’s green initiatives? Let us know in the comments below!