Google this: Spinning Spur Wind Project, Oldham County, Texas. You’ll see that the company famous for its ubiquitous search engine has purchased a 200 million dollar stake in this 161 Megawatt wind farm in West Texas. The farm has 70 turbines and produces energy sufficient to satisfy the needs of 60,000 homes. The wind farm started up for real at the end of 2012 and thanks to it being situated in a particularly windy part of the lone star state- known as the Texas panhandle, it is a particularly efficient wind farm.
Whether you’re a fan of Google or not (and their policing of websites to make sure there’s no hanky-panky in getting yours into the front page, is renown for being brutal) it’s encouraging to see such a large company investing in green energy. What’s also worth trumpeting is that they are not doing this for altruistic reasons… Google’s senior manager of corporate finance said “We look for projects like Spinning Spur because, in addition to creating more renewable energy and strengthening the local economy, they also make for smart investments.” He also added that such projects yielded “attractive returns relative to the risks.”
That’s encouraging of all those thinking of investing in wind renewable energy. Critics of google complain that their servers use loads of electricity, but imagine how many unhappy people there would be if Google search kept falling over because of interrupted energy supplies? Back to Google’s investment- it’s their second biggest ever in renewable energy; it now has five winf and five solar investments. It has invested a total of one billion dollars in renewable energy, which can’t be bad…
Spinning Spur is the 10th green energy investment Google has made since 2010. It’s the second most expensive investment, behind only a $280 million stake in SolarCity, a solar systems company. The company has five solar investments and five wind investments. In all, Google has invested ober one billion dollars in renewable energy.
Needless to say I looked up all this information during a Google search… what goes around comes around I guess…
