GOOGLE - Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin
With no exception Google proved its enormous appetite and determination to dominate the technological-cyberspace-environmental areas. From a search engine few years ago Google grow into a mega force leading today's technology... Web giant's high profile, deep pockets and embrace of the unconventional are the assets Google exhibits the most.
Google Inc. has chosen William McDonough, an acclaimed environmentalist architect to make preliminary designs of its planned offices at the NASA Ames Research Center. The building is intended to go green as William McDonough is one of the godfathers of environmentally friendly architecture, his projects feature grass roofs and recycled water, to name only few of his field braking ideas.
Some of McDonough's most maverick ideas include building wind-powered server farms, because the cold winters would help reduce the amount of electricity needed to cool thousands of computers. Parking lots should be built not of asphalt, but layers of stone and dirt so that the ground can absorb rain water rather than have it run off into drainage ditches. The most striking, however, is an undulating roof covered with native grasses and wildflowers that serves as insulation, reduces the amount of heat reflected into the atmosphere and helps clean the air.
The assignment signals Google's intentions to go green at the facility, an ambitious complex that could encompass up to 1 million square feet of office space, the equivalent of nearly 17 footfall fields.
Google has already initiated other environmentally friendly initiatives, having recently disclosed plans to mount solar panels on the rooftops and parking lots of its Mountain View headquarters. The project is to install 1.6 megawatts of solar photovoltaic panels at the main Google campus in Mountain View, California. This project is estimated to provide approximately 30% of their peak power usage: equivalent to approximately 1,200 average California homes. (Yes, that means that the Google complex uses approximately the power of 3,333 homes.) Google remains an electricity hog. Its massive data centers, which house hundreds of thousands of servers by some estimates, suck up huge amounts of power.
In deciding to build at NASA Ames, Google is hoping to make room for its rapidly expanding workforce, based just a few minutes away at what is known as the Googleplex, a series of low-rise, glass offices built around a grassy courtyard. NASA's research park offers Google a large swath of vacant land, a rare opportunity in Silicon Valley, where most large parcels are already paved over.
In addition to moving into NASA Ames, Google plans a high-profile collaboration with the space agency for research, education and developing products. The public can expect the first fruits of the partnership by June, NASA representatives said at a recent news conference. Allowing Internet users to take virtual flights across the moon and through canyons on Mars is among the plans in the works.
