BigQuery Public Datasets Program
Carbon-free energy data for Google Cloud regions & data centers.
To power each Google Cloud region and/or data center, we use electricity from the grid where the region is located. This electricity generates more or less carbon emissions (gCO2eq), depending on the type of power plants generating electricity for that grid and when we consume it. In 2020, we set a goal to match our energy consumption with carbon-free energy (CFE), every hour and in every region by 2030. As we work towards our 2030 goal, we want to provide transparency on our progress.
To characterize each region we use a metric: "CFE%". This metric is calculated for every hour in every region and tells us what percentage of the energy we consumed during an hour that is carbon-free. We take into account the carbon-free energy that’s already supplied by the grid, in addition to the investments we have made in renewable energy in that location to reach our 24/7 carbon-free objective
We do not currently have the hourly energy information available for calculating the metrics for all regions. We anticipate rolling out the calculated metrics using hourly data to regions as the data becomes available.
The hourly grid mix data used to calculate these metrics is from Electricity Maps
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Detailed dataset description:
Year: The year for which the Google CFE metric has been aggregated. We will continue to add new data for each year as we make progress. Note that the Google CFE metric will only be included for the years that the Cloud Region or Data Center was operational. For example, the Data Center in Denmark came online in 2020, so the Google CFE data for that region starts in 2020 (and there is no data for Denmark for 2019).
CFE Region: The regional boundary of the electric grid we consider when calculating the Google CFE score. For most of the world, the CFE region is defined as the country. However, for countries that have distinct grids, such as the US, there are multiple CFE regions, which are defined by the balancing authority.
Zone ID: This is the ID associated with the CFE Region based on the Electricity Maps API definition
Cloud Region: The Google Cloud Region
Location: This is the "friendly name" of the Cloud Region. For Google Data Centers that are not Cloud regions, the location will be the country (non-US) or the state (US) that the Data Center is located in.
Google_CFE: This metric is calculated for every hour in every region and tells us what percentage of the energy we consumed during an hour that is carbon-free. We take into account the carbon-free energy that’s already supplied by the grid, in addition to the investments we have made in renewable energy in that location to reach our 24/7 carbon-free objective
Grid Carbon Intensity: Grid Emissions Intensity measures how clean the electricity consumption is in a zone in a given period. It represents how many kilograms of carbon dioxide (CO2) are released in the atmosphere for each megawatt hour (MWh) of electricity consumed.
Try the sample query below in the BigQuery UI.
Retrieve regional carbon-free energy data for years later than 2021.
Run this query
Copyright 2021 Google LLC. This data is licensed by Google under a a CC-BY-SA 4.0 license
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