Google provides seed funding to Taiwanese renewable energy program

Google is concerned about the well being of the environment and has provided seed funding to a renewable energy company based in Taiwan.

This is not the first investment in a green company either. To date, Google has acquired about two gigawatts of renewable energy, an equivalent of taking nearly one million cars off the road, making it the world’s largest non-utility purchaser of renewables.

Google has provided seed funding to the Center for Resource Solutions (CRS) in a bid to provide all of its data centers around the world with renewable energy, a commitment the company has made in which it looks to invest over US$2.5-billion in renewable energy projects.

CRS, according to Google, has over 20 years of experience developing and operating renewable energy certification programs.

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Google, which itself is owned by Alphabet, says that it is buying both the physical power and the renewable energy commitments (RECs) associated with that power, a move that it sees it providing them with both the financial benefits of renewable energy and the assurance that the electricity it is buying is in fact renewable.

“These kinds of programs are key in helping companies like Google actually know that the power we are buying comes from a renewable source. They work by “tagging” each MWh of energy generated from a source like wind or solar as renewable, which creates a renewable energy certificate (REC). This is especially important to us in Taiwan, where we are actively looking to purchase renewable energy for our data center,” Marsden Hanna, Global Energy Policy and Strategy at Google, said in a blog post.

The funding will allow CRS to examine how best to structure programs across Asia to create robust voluntary renewable energy markets. The company will begin to build a coalition of international stakeholders from the public, private and NGO sectors to drive these efforts forward.

Feature image: Tony Webster via Flickr