Google is going green.

Tech giant Google announced that it will run entirely on renewable energy in 2017. This will be a huge shift for the company that, according to the New York Times, consumed as much energy as the city of San Francisco in previous years.

Google states that both its data centers and offices will reach the 100 percent renewable energy mark in 2017, with the majority of power derived from wind and solar. According to a press release by the company, going green makes the most sense economically in addition to Google’s goal of reducing its carbon footprint to zero. With wind energy prices down 60 percent and solar down 80 percent over the past six years, Google’s move to renewables will both make an environmental impact and help the company cut operating expenses.

In part, Google is able to make this transition due to the number of large-scale deals the company has made with renewable energy producers over the past few years. Google has guaranteed to purchase energy from renewable start-ups, which then allows those start-ups to obtain the capital necessary to expand their business.

“We are the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy in the world,” Joe Kava, Google’s senior vice president of technical infrastructure, told the New York Times. “It’s good for the economy, good for business and good for our shareholders.”

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In honor of Alessandro Volta’s 270th birthday, Google is celebrating the man best known for inventing the first battery with today’s Google Doodle.

While Volta was a trained physicist, many consider him to be the first great electrochemist. By inventing the first battery, which he called the electric “pile”, he established the starting point of electrochemical science and technology with the first notable electrochemical storage device.

The turning point for Volta’s development of the battery came in 1780, when his collaborator Luigi Galvani discovered that the contact of two different metals with the muscle of a frog leg resulted in the generation of electric current.

Volta respectfully disagreed with Luigi’s theory that animal tissue was essential in the creation of electricity, arguing that the frog legs served only as an electroscope and further suggested that the true source of stimulation was the contact between dissimilar metals. With this theory, he began experimenting with metals alone in 1794.

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“Google Science” would launch a number of journals, be “self-organising” and yet have a team of “qualified reviewers.”

There is a Google Scholar, but what if there was a Google Science? The UK edition of Wired magazine is tracking the mystery of whether it is or is not in the mix in How ‘Google Science’ could transform academic publishing.

“Google Science” would launch a number of journals, be “self-organising” and yet have a team of “qualified reviewers”.

“99.9 percent of the work, including peer review would be done by the scientific community,”

This is, of course, about open access an issue we at ECS are committed to. There’s a great discussion on this. The article says:

“Most [academics] don’t particularly care about open access, in part because they are not incentivised to do so. This is changing, but only slowly, and right now most still care more about publishing in established, high-profile journals and in gaining a lot of citations.”

Google could change the game, if they really were going to get involved. Spoiler alert: Wired found no evidence a Google Science was in the works.

Find out more about ECS open access.