Google Bay View, the company’s newest campus, consists of three squat buildings nestled near the San Francisco Bay shoreline a few miles east of its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.
Design
- The first things visitors notice are the roofs. They curve down gently from pinched peaks, like circus tents, sloping almost to the ground.
- Each roof is blanketed with overlapping solar panels that glisten with a brushed metal sheen on the edges.
- Google calls this design Dragonscale, and indeed it looks as if a mystical beast is curled up by the water in Silicon Valley.
- Google envisions its latest campus as the embodiment of a grander ambition to run its operations entirely free of carbon.
- Beneath the buildings, thousands of concrete pillars plunged into the ground will serve as a sort of geothermal battery, storing heat to warm the building and water supply without natural gas.
- The roof panels were constructed with a unique textured glass to prevent glare and with canopies that emit a soft, glowing light into the spacious atria inside.
- Outside, the air is thick with wildfire smoke, a new annual reality for all of California. Hurricane Ida is pummeling the East Coast.
- Each disaster underscores how late corporate America is to the climate change fight.
- Google goals to go even additional. It’s dedicated to go freed from carbon, with out utilizing offsets and relying solely on clear power bought close to its places, 24 hours a day.
- Which means in Chile, the place photo voltaic panels energy Google’s knowledge middle through the day, the corporate should discover a resolution when the solar units.
- In dense Taiwan and Singapore, the place its knowledge facilities run virtually fully on fossil fuels, it should discover large quantities of inexperienced options in a short time.
Last year, Google met 67% of its data center electricity needs with renewable sources on an hourly basis, a 6% jump from the prior year. Data centers in certain places, such as Oklahoma and Oregon, run on close to or above 90% clean sources. But getting off carbon elsewhere is a bigger challenge, and Google is aiming well beyond typical corporate targets. Dozens of companies have pledged to reach carbon neutrality, covering their energy usage either with renewable sources or offsets.
