Accelerating Sustainability with Cloud AI

Accelerating sustainability comes from harnessing powerful, purpose-built information technology capable of working at a global level. That’s why we’re proud to expand our suite of AI-powered solutions aimed at helping our customers find new ways to sustainably measure, optimize, and transform their operations. 

At Google Cloud Next this year, we announced four key sustainability initiatives:

• New Environment APIs on Google Maps Platform including Solar, Pollen, and Air Quality APIs. These products apply AI and machine learning along with aerial imagery and environmental data to share up-to-date information about solar potential, air quality and pollen levels. The Solar API, for example, calculates the solar potential of buildings to facilitate the transition to clean energy and to optimize panel layout designs. 

• A new BigQuery connector to Google Earth Engine can drive deeper interoperability between these two platforms, improving ease of use for workflows and enabling new analytics that combine raster and tabular data. This is enabling Woza, a Google Cloud partner, to help consumer packaged goods companies monitor farming impacts at the field level. 

• Carbon Footprint for Google Workspace can empower companies to track the carbon footprint of using Workspace. It can also help users understand the carbon emissions from Google Workspace product usage, breaking down emissions by services, such as Gmail or Drive. This complements Google Cloud Carbon Footprint, which already helps customers measure, track and report on the gross carbon emissions associated with the electricity of their Google Cloud Platform usage.
• Finally, we have launched an initiative with Deloitte to accelerate the adoption of sustainability solutions. These include a fleet solution for electrified vehicles that allows a single view of resource optimization, telematics, and climate-related impact. Working with Climate Engine, Deloitte and Google Cloud are helping companies like NatWest better understand their customer’s climate and nature impacts. Deloitte is the first global system integrator to join our rapidly expanding Google Cloud Ready – Sustainability partner program. 

These AI-powered tools can bring new insights to help companies to take action for greater sustainability on a global level and add value by providing critical information to protect people from environmental hazards. 

They’re one example of Google Cloud’s commitment to driving transformation, a key element of addressing climate change. Google has matched its electricity use on an annual basis with 100 percent renewable energy every year since 2017, and is now pursuing an ambitious goal of operating its entire business on carbon-free energy 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, by 2030. Since we set this goal in 2020, many organizations and governments have joined us on the carbon-free journey. 

Tools and initiatives like the ones we will be discussing at the Sustainable Retail Summit 2023, in Copenhagen, are critical to realizing a vision of a cleaner, more efficient, sustainable and prosperous future for everyone. We look forward to sharing more at the summit.