Google wants its data centers to be carbon neutral around the clock.
Google
Google is working to achieve carbon-free energy around the clock in all data centers in an ongoing effort to address climate change concerns. The new carbon-intelligent computing platform will help Google adapt its computing load to energy sources such as wind and solar energy, the technology giant said on Wednesday.
To this end, the timing of non-urgent tasks such as YouTube video processing has been shifted by adding new words to Google translation and adding new features to the Google Photo Filter when wind and solar power are most abundant. The move does not affect more important functions such as Google Maps, Search and YouTube, which are used at all times.
“Our carbon-intelligent platform … predicts every day in every Google data center how the average hourly carbon intensity of the local power grid will change over the course of a day,” said Ana Radovanovic, technical manager for carbon-intelligent computing at Google, wrote in a blog post. “A complementary internal forecast from Google predicts the hourly power resources a data center needs to perform its computing tasks over the same period.”
The carbon-intelligent computing platform then uses these predictions to “optimize the hourly guidelines to adapt computing tasks to times of low-carbon power supply”.