Last October, Google announced that they are going for massive solar energy production and launched the largest solar panel installation to date on their corporate campus in Mountain View, CA headquarters. By June 18th the installation was almost done and a total of 9,212 solar panels making up about 1,600 kilowatts peak time power capacity. Panels cover the rooftops of eight buildings and two newly constructed solar carports at the Googleplex. See photo below:

Google's solar panels are projected to produce enough electricity for approximately 1,000 California homes or 30% of Google's peak electricity demand in our solar powered buildings. This is the biggest solar panels array ever built in the us mainly due to the huge costs involved. Google did not share any prices with us but we can estimate that its few million dollars at least.

The thing that made me really impressed with Google's new Solar System is that they managed to build online monitoring station where people can see the solar panels performance in real time which is really awesome. Check out this link here: Google Solar Panels Monitoring Station. On the graphic we can clearly see that during the night there is zero generated power and at noon is the peak. In fact that clearly shows how solar power is generated throughout the day....

The best way to analyze the generated power is to cut the peak on half and assume that only half of the peak time generated power will be used/usable and the rest should be stored for later use (during the night). Google has huge amount of batteries but they don't store all the excess energy due to the nature of their business as the power requirements during the day are about 90% of their needs and therefore they do not need to store energy for the night.

Another really cool thing Google implemented was the Plug-In-Hybrid cars that are powered by electricity. Those cars are loaded during the day by the huge solar panel array and their own garage rooftop solar system (only a fraction of the whole system).

Google is going for clean energy with the hopes that many more large corporations will follow their steps and help keep our environment clean