The Corporate Ecoforum has honored three winners at its 10th Anniversary Leadership Retreat for exemplifying the fundamental connection between sustainability, innovation and long-term business success in a globalizing world
CEF presented the 2017 C.K. Prahalad Awards for sustainability leadership by an individual executive to Ursa Hölzle, Senior Vice President of Technical Infrastructure for Google, and to Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance (REBA) for collaboration. The jury also extended an honorary award to Dr. John B. Good enough, Professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. The awards were announced recently at the 10th Anniversary CEF Leadership Retreat, attended by senior executives representing CEF member companies with combined revenues of over $3 trillion.
Hölzle was recognized for bringing about innovations and radical efficiencies in data center technology and increasing corporate purchasing of renewable energy, which have allowed Google to aggressively reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A pioneer in green data center design, Hölzle’s leadership has resulted in significantly less energy used at Google data centers when compared to traditional data center designs. This is significant, because in aggregate, Google’s cloud infrastructure consumes as much capacity as the city of San Francisco daily.
Hölzle has also played a key role in Google’s ‘moonshot’ commitment to achieve zero waste to landfill for its global data center operations, diverting 86% of waste from such operations, and achieving 100% diversion rates at six data centers in 2016. He has led Google to become the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy, achieving 100% renewable energy and carbon neutrality for its global operations in 2017. The company has signed 20 agreements totaling 2.6 gigawatts of renewable energy since 2010, generating emissions savings equivalent to taking more than 1.2 million cars off the road.
This story is from the August 2017 edition of Sustainability Next.
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This story is from the August 2017 edition of Sustainability Next.
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