[MUSIC PLAYING]
SPEAKER 1: Data centers use about 1%
of electricity in the world.
So today, let's explore how data centers are powered,
especially in a world confronting
the threat of climate change.
In September 2020, Google CEO Sundar Pichai
unveiled that Google would become
one of the first companies to operate
carbon-free 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year
by 2030.
Carbon-free means running data centers
on clean electricity that does not come from fossil fuels.
But how does a global technology company
with a constant need for electricity
achieve the ability to slash all of its carbon emissions
within a decade?
Well, that's a big question.
And to answer it, we have to go back in time.
In 2006, Google installed over 9,000 solar panels
in its Mountain View, California buildings,
and learned how to optimize our efficiency with tricks
like finding optimal locations and washing them.
But six years later, it was still
a unique and custom process to buy renewable energy.
Traditional power companies didn't have the experience
with the volume of wind and solar that Google was seeking.
But fast-forward to today, and Google
has become the largest corporate purchaser of clean energy.
And utility companies now have an idea of what's needed,
making it an industry standard.
Just like computer chips, higher production volumes
create lower costs.
As clean energy has gone mainstream,
the cost has declined.
And wind and solar are now cheaper than any other resource
in many areas of the world.
Adding clean energy to grids is only one part of the strategy.
Data centers also need to be designed efficiently.
Historically, it took a massive amount of cooling.
A data center technician in the 1980s
would be wearing a very thick sweater,
since temperatures inside were around 58 degrees all the time.
Today, a T-shirt suffices.
A lot of effort has been placed on designing better cooling
systems and isolating the hot aisles from the cold aisles.
In fact, in 2018, a data center engineer
created an ML algorithm that exponentially improved
cooling loads by at least 30%.
This AI-powered efficiency recommendation system
ingested all the cooling system data
we had on power, temperature, and pump speeds
and fed it to neural networks that
learned how to operate the mechanical systems more
efficiently.
Teams of engineers also worked on how
to make the servers more efficient to squeeze
more computation out of each machine.
In the past, an idle server could use just
as much energy as one that is processing at max capacity.
One way to improve this capacity was to virtualize machines.
That means you take a physical device such as a server
and run multiple instances of an operating system.
It's almost like having 10, 20, or even 50 different computing
loads running on one physical device,
keeping utilization high and energy emissions low.
Between 2010 and 2018, overall computing efficiency
grew by 550% in data centers.
And in 2019, Google reported that its data centers delivered
over seven times as much computing power
with the same amount of electrical energy.
Google began to buy enough solar and wind
energy to match its total electricity use worldwide
since 2017, but there were still more work to do.
For example, there were still data centers
that could only use solar energy during the day,
but at night were using carbon-intensive energy
from the grid.
So the energy teams at Google started
thinking about our mission in a completely different way.
How could we match every bit by search, payment,
and translation, to a zero-carbon electron?
Googler Anna Radovanovich understood
that there was a way to use data to tell
when power was clean or dirty at any given time.
Since Google logs data on every single compute workload,
we could analyze which tasks did not
need to happen immediately, such as the training of machine
learning models.
These tasks could be safely scheduled at a later time
and powered with clean energy without affecting performance.
This is called demand response, which
is not a new concept for big energy consumers like grocery
stores, offices, or factories who reduce their energy demand
at certain times of the day.
Even though this concept has been around a long time,
Google is going about it in a pretty unique way.
And carbon-aware computing has made
a huge shift in the industry.
Although complicated, it's key to decarbonizing
the digital economy.
By mid 2020, all the elements came together--
incredibly cheap renewable energy, radical improvements
in efficiency, higher-density batteries, green hydrogen,
and novel types of greener nuclear plants.
For the first time, Google was able to put a firm
date on our 24/7 carbon goal.
This is so important to us, as the next decade
is vital to limit climate change and make
a huge shift in our relationship with natural resources.
If you want to learn more, check out the links below,
and stay tuned for more on discovering data centers.