Google blows

Google has signed up to a 20 year partnership with a wind farm  in Iowa, United States The energy produced will give Google enough power to maintain several of their data centers.
Google’s senior vice president for operations, Urs Hoelzle said: “This is a case where buying green makes business sense. By contracting to purchase so much energy for so long, we’re giving the developer of the wind farm financial certainty to build additional clean energy projects.”
This deal will be the first by Google Energy LLC, which was established last December to acquire large volumes of renewable energy by participating in the wholesale market. Google will start buying 114MW of energy directly from the wind farm on 30 July this year. The remaining 36MW from Story II are currently being sold to the city of Ames in Iowa.
In an official statement they explained
" In this case, we’re buying renewable energy directly from its source – the wind farm. We cannot use this energy directly, so we’re reselling it back to the grid in the regional spot market – but retiring the RECs associated with the power. By obtaining RECs through the purchase of green power, our deal has a greater impact on the renewable industry than simply buying “naked” RECs from third parties; our long-term commitment directly frees up capital for the developer to build more wind projects.
While we are happy to be purchasing renewable energy as part of our environmental commitment, this is also a structure that makes long term financial sense for Google. Through the long term purchase of renewable energy at a predetermined price, we’re partially protecting ourselves against future increases in power prices. This is a case where buying green makes business sense."
This step is consistent with strong environmental position of Google, with a special emphasis on energy and wind power. In May, they made the first direct investment in electricity generation with an investment  of $ 38.8m (£ 25.5m) for two wind projects in North Dakota, which use advanced turbine technology.
Rick Needham, green business operations manager at Google, acknowledged that the investment marked something of a shift in the company's green investment strategy after its earlier funding for a number of high-profile renewable energy start-ups.
"We have been dedicating resources to developing new technologies, including making investments in early-stage renewable energy companies such as eSolar and AltaRock," he said. "Smart capital includes not only these early-stage company investments, but also dedicated funding for utility-scale projects. To tackle this need, we’ve been looking at investments in renewable energy projects, like the one we just signed, that can accelerate the deployment of the latest clean energy technology while providing attractive returns to Google and more capital for developers to build additional projects."
Google's stakes in the wind farms are in the form of tax equity investments, in which investors take over a project and use federal tax credits granted to the project to offset their own taxes as a return.
There has been speculation for some time that Google will ultimately invest directly in large-scale renewable energy projects. The company's datacentres are among the largest consumers of electricity in the corporate world and the company has long maintained that it is in their economic interest to ensure the supply of renewable energy.