Googleplex Solar

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The Googleplex headquarters located in Mountain View California has installed one of the largest corporate solar power structures of any other company to date. The array consists of 9,212 solar panels produced by Sharp Electronics and has a capacity of 1.6 Megawatts (MW) which cover's ~30% of the Google campus electricity needs, the equivalent of roughly 1,000 California homes.

This installation is said to save Google $393,000 in electricity per year and can be monitored real time at this interactive page that contains data on the electricity being produced. One of the most unique features of the Googleplex array of solar panels is that it contains several clusters of solar trees. These parking lot covers are designed to keep cars cool while also producing electricity and serving it to both the Googleplex or plugin hybrid electric cars (PHEV's).

Google has long been a leader in environmental stewardship and has offered employees discounts on hybrid cars. Now that many Google employee hybrid owners are upgrading their cars to be plugins at places like Pat's Garage in San Francisco (which cost's about $10,000) Google is offering free charging as another incentive. In the rendering (taken from Google Earth and Sketchup) shown directly below you can see the solar trees off to the bottom left side.

google-headquarters-solar-3d.jpg
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This page contains a single entry by Court Rye published on March 30, 2009 10:33 AM.

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