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The report also acknowledges that Google, like other large companies,

March 11, 2017 by Kimberly Parks

The report also acknowledges that Google, like other large companies, "does not own the energy it consumes, and does not intend those investments to be used to reduce its carbon footprint." This means that Google's data centers must use up more renewable energy if it is to keep moving to cleaner energy technologies -- or if they want to, but, as one of Google's engineers told the New York Times , they will need other sources of energy to meet their energy needs.

I asked Google's engineer, Dr. J.B. Johnson, about his comments. He told me he's not a big fan of the idea that companies should be offsetting their carbon footprints by paying customers for fossil fuels that they use in the form of energy that they use to perform their jobs.

"I don't think you should pay people to get fossil fuel pollution," Johnson said. "If that's the case, we should give people more of the benefit of the doubt, and they shouldn't have to put their money into fossil fuels to get a lot of that."

This kind of "efficiency" is why I suspect that Google has been making some sort of effort at offsetting its carbon footprint by selling some of its energy in ways that are pretty obvious from the "clean" side of things. For instance, in a recent Google event, it was shown that its data centers have "clean" energy that is sold back to them as "carbon-free."

So even though it's technically possible for Google to offset its carbon footprint by buying clean energy, there are several ways to do it. One is by charging people to use less electricity in the days to come. It's not so hard to do in most countries. That's because most electricity prices are very low.

Another way, as Johnson points out, is through a system called "smart meters" that will allow companies to monitor solar energy usage across their entire datacenters and in their own units.