Buying enough renewable energy to match its global consumption is no small brag for a company that uses as much electricity as San Francisco or Hawaii.
Yet, that is exactly the brag Google makes in a recent self-authored report on its commitment to operating sustainably.
The lead of the company’s sustainability reporting team, Laura Franceschini, was hired four years ago at the same time the Alphabet Inc.-owned conglomerate was writing its first report of the kind.
“The tech industry is a relatively new industry on a global scale compared to other industries—like manufacturing, or chemicals, or oil and gas—that have been around for much longer,” she commented during a phone interview from San Francisco. “So a lot of the tech companies hadn’t done things like sustainability reporting because they were just newer in their corporate journey.”
A journey—in fact, a “very long journey”—is how Franceschini describes the path from Gateway to the North to Silicon Valley.
She still calls herself an Edmontonian, having graduated alongside Mayor Don Iveson from Strathcona High School in 1997 and completed her first degrees at the University of Alberta. But in 2006, the fresh alum was hired by Stantec and tasked with leading its corporate sustainability program. Franceschini was with Stantec for six years until she began looking at grad schools in the U.S.
In her application essay to Yale, she wrote that she wanted to work for a big tech company in San Francisco after graduation. She made it to both places.
“I feel really, really fortunate to be at this company at this point in time when we’re facing so many urgent sustainability challenges,” Franceschini said.
She believes Google’s capacity to create change is multi-dimensional. In 2010, the company announced a goal to reduce its carbon footprint with purchases of renewable energy, and has matched its global consumption (10 million megawatt-hours, annually) for two years in a row now. As of September 2019, it had invested in long-term wind and solar energy deals equivalent to 5,500 megawatts throughout the world. Google also considers itself carbon neutral since 2007, meaning it reduces its carbon impact with energy efficiency strategies, renewable energy and carbon offsets so that its net operational carbon emissions are zero.
“When we do things like that, people take notice,” Franceschini said of Google's leadership role.
“It helps open up markets and help other companies to procure renewable energy more easily. It sets an example for other companies in the tech industry about what can be done regarding sustainability.”
Next, Google is working towards 24x7 carbon-free energy, or the real-time powering of its services with renewable sources.
“Internet use is 24x7 and it’s fairly constant. People want access to Google and YouTube and Search and Maps all the time, and that demand is fairly constant around the world by 24x7. But renewable energy is very intermittent,” she explained. Wind farms are most productive when it's windy, solar when it's sunny.
“(We are) looking at new technologies and options to better match energy use at different times of the day with when carbon-free energy is being produced, and also making sure energy is being generated close to where we're using energy."
According to Franceschini, Google's environmental goals have become more front-facing partly because of the public's standards of corporate responsibility—like reporting on sustainability performance.
“Google didn’t tend to be so vocal about itself as a brand and a company more than five years ago. We just focused on developing great products and trying to get users to use the great products that we built.
"But as part of our evolution as a company, and talking about our self more as… a corporate culture,” she said, "sustainability has become part of that.”
