Google increases investment in clean energy

Google announced on Thursday that it is investing 75 million U.S. dollars in a wind farm in the Midwestern U.S. state of Iowa, making its total investment in clean energy projects to nearly 1 billion dollars. The Iowa clean energy project, called the Rippey Wind Farm, has a capacity to produce 50 MW of wind power which is enough to power 15,000 homes, according to Google's official blog. The wind farm is about 209 kilometers northeast of Council Bluffs, Iowa, where sits one of Google's data centers backing up its search engine and other services. Along with the Iowa wind farm, Google's investment in clean energy now exceeds 990 million dollars. The Internet search giant said it wants to use more renewable energy for its data centers and plans to have about one third of its data centers being powered by clean energy. Google, based in Mountain View, California, created in June last year a 280-million-dollar fund with SolarCity, an American home solar energy designing and installing company, and the investment is said to be Google's largest of the kind in clean power to date. The search giant also pumped another 100 million dollars in the world's largest wind farm based in the U.S. state of Oregon in April last year, while unveiling a new plan in September to buy clean energy to directly power one of its data centers.