ENN, the Environmental News Network, recently announced that Dell (DELL – $19.53), the world’s largest mail-order computer vendor and maker of the infinitely adaptable Dell PC and laptop computers, was running its 2.1-million square foot Round Rock facility entirely on renewable energy.
Round Rock, Texas, the home base for Dell, is just outside Austin, the state capital, and home to two environmental "must-sees"; the largest North American colony of Mexican free-tailed bats, which live under the Congress Avenue bridge and fly every evening in a tourist-attracting cloud of black wings, and the 809-acre Barton Creek Greenbelt, with its walking and biking trails, swimming holes and sheer rock walls favored by climbers.
Dell’s Round Rock headquarters is powered primarily through wind supplied by Energy Future Holdings Corporation through TXU Energy, a retail energy provider. The remaining 40 percent comes from a landfill gas-to-energy plant operated by Waste Management from the Austin Community Landfill.
Dell, a participant in Austin Energy’s GreenChoice power program (the most successful in the nation, with 665 million kilowatt hours), will also upgrade its Austin Parmer Campus to 17-percent renewable energy. Dell’s Twin Falls, Idaho, call center is already getting 97 percent of its power from wind and 3 percent from solar energy. All of this is in line with Dell’s goal to become carbon neutral by 2008. Dell’s President, Paul Bell, recently issued a challenge to other technology providers to follow suit, citing the fact that green energy is not only good for the planet, but helps keep energy costs down.
Google (GOOG – $475.72), a technology company at the delivery end and the largest Internet search engine in the world, recently announced that it would spend hundreds of millions of dollars funding research and development of renewable energies. The promise is partly altruistic – we would expect no less of Google, whose initial IPO was a promise of sustainability – and partly an effort to reduce costs at Google’s enormous data centers. The initiative, which Google is calling RE
If technology can meet the green challenge, why can’t government? The Department of Energy (DOE) has been sitting on its hands, spending a paltry $1.5 billion of its $45 billion budget on renewable energy. Meanwhile, the $2-trillion war in Iraq, soon to be escalated to include Iran, could have funded enough alternative energy to supply two-thirds of this nation with clean, green power.
Is our government simply overburdened, outdated and so nepotistic no free-thinkers remain, or is it so influenced by the enormous lobbying (and financial) power of the energy industry that it can’t see the handwriting on the wall?
We are facing the End of Oil, an era beyond which extracting reserves will cost more (and create more environmental damage) than they are worth – or at least more than the ordinary worker can afford to pay. Unfortunately, changing administrations is no guarantee that renewable won’t still get short shrift in the money versus renewability equation. If significant change occurs, it will be thanks to corporations like Dell and Google, leading the way forward, not only in technology, but in renewable energy.
I don’t own stock in Dell or Google.