I find it interesting how image conscious Google is and what they are willing to spend to provide the view that they are green. There are ways that they could truly make a larger real impact. Real time energy costs for wholesale consumers are determined by the marginal cost of energy bid into the electricity market. In the case of intermittent generation supplied from solar and wind those costs would normally be at a fixed rate to recover the cost of capacity since wind and solar are fuel sources that have no costs. Interestingly water does have a cost as the government charges a fee for water passed through the turbine.
All dispatchable generation sources get paid based on real time pricing of power not what it costs them to generate that power. The generator bids their energy in normally at a very fair cost close to what their fuel costs are that way they get dispatched and benefit by recieving whatever the real time costs (set by the highest bid that is loaded..the highest cost generator on the system).
At the same time large loads (energy intensive industry) that pay real time rates can curtail their production if the real time costs of power becomes too high which of course reduces the power demand and the high cost generation that was running gets dispatched off and the price of real time energy is reduced. Generally speaking the most expensive resources can be considered as that most dirty resources i.e. the dirtiest coal fired generation in that region.
So my point is the cloud could play a much larger role in contributing to reducing the global carbon footprint. The smart grid approach to generation dispatch could be applied to data dispatch in the cloud to concentrate compute demand according to real time energy costs.
But then again by that time POET will have integrated their quantum compute capabilities into the data center and energy demand for global IT applications will have dropped to a small fraction of today’s demand. Then google can start selling their green capacity.
