Google and its parent company, Alphabet Inc, have long put themselves forward as leaders in renewable energy use. Last week, they took that a step further by announcing that they are now "working toward 24x7 clean energy everywhere we have datacentres”.
Because renewable energy supply fluctuates based on the availability of things like sun and wind, that means that in practice, Google will have to shift computing demand in its datacentres to renewable energy at times when the supply on the power grid is at its peak. This is a form of demand response in which energy consumers change their power consumption to better match the grid. But this version has a twist – a twist so big that it’s really an inversion of the concept.