Google announced plans in late 2016 to increase its spending on renewable energy. In fact, Google intended to go 100% renewable. Today, Google announced it met the goal last year of matching all of its global energy usage with purchases of renewable energy.

This does not mean Google's facilities all run on 100% renewable energy. It's logistically difficult to get enough power from wind or solar in all locations to only use renewables. However, Google has offset its non-renewable usage by financing wind and solar power farms. It takes a year or two to get these new projects up and running, but Google accelerated its move into renewable energy throughout 2016. At the end of 2016, Google was already covering 57% of its energy usage with renewable sources.

Today, Google has purchased around 3 gigawatts of output from renewables at a cost of $3 billion. That offsets all the power used in Google's offices and data centers. It also makes Google the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy by a wide margin—Amazon and Microsoft are a little more than a third of the way there, but everyone else is far behind. Google plans to continue its renewable investments as it keeps building new facilities.

Source: Google