what is good for a few corporations good for all?
Companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Apple have set lofty goals and tight deadlines to eliminate their carbon impact. It is Google's goal to have secured enough carbon-free energy to reliably power all its data centres and campuses globally by the end of this decade.
But the Southeast, one of the fastest-growing parts of the nation, offers considerable challenges to firms' aspirations to speedily access vast new volumes of renewable energy. Is what is good for a few firms good for everybody, and does the struggle that Google is having in the region, where it has a lot of data centres, raise a problem that applies to the energy transition globally?
One of Google and its tech-giant friends' key aims in this effort is to replace the decades-old regulatory framework in the Southeast that enables just a limited number of utilities to produce and sell power there with a market where several enterprises may compete for that business.
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