Google announces new version of Google Earth Engine – TechCrunch

If you ask most executives if they want to do the right thing by the planet, chances are they are going to say yes, even if they don’t know exactly what that involves. Some companies could exaggerate their intentions in a process known as “greenwashing,” but companies with more honorable motives need tools to help understand the data about their energy usage, and if they are meeting the goals they have set for themselves.

This week at the first Sustainability SummitGoogle Cloud introduced a series of solutions that build on existing tooling and others that are new to create a sustainability platform. This allows enterprises and governments to set sustainability goals, compare their internal data with public data, and visualize and analyze how they are doing in terms of sustainability goals.

Jenn Bennett, technical director for sustainable in the office CTO at Google Cloud is a statement that sustainability is such an important problem. The company wants to give customers tools to help them understand their current situation and solve immediate problems, taking advantage of the work Google does internally.

“If I look at a lot of the things that are going on across Google, you may see something like sustainability as a whole. It could also involve your food. It’s in your cafeterias. It’s your energy within your data centers. It’s your supply chain and all of your Scope 3 emissions, and yet all these things actually interlink together as a complex ecosystem,” she said.

Google has announced a number of tools to assist, including a new version Google Earth EngineThis tool is now available to enterprise customers. It was previously only available for scientists and NGOs. The enterprise version gives companies access to sophisticated data with the goal of building high-level visualizations that can show the impact of your company’s raw materials usage on a particular area and how it cascades across the planet.

Rebecca Moore, who directs Google’s geospatial initiatives, says this ability to tap into data pouring in from satellites can give companies real-time insight into their environmental impact. “Google Earth Engine, which we originally launched to scientists and NGOs in 2010, is at the forefront of planetary scale environmental monitoring, with one of the world’s largest publicly available Earth observation data catalogs,” Moore explained.

She added, “It combines data from hundreds of satellites and other sources that are continuously streaming into Earth Engine. This data is then combined to massive geospatial cloud computing resources. This enables transformation of the raw data into timely and accurate, high-resolution, decision-relevant insights about global state. This can include forests, water, ecosystems, agriculture and how all of these are changing over time.”

Moore points out that data-driven tools such as this with Google BigQuery, and the Google Maps platform can be combined to create this powerful combination of tooling. “With the power of Google Cloud, and with the intelligence of the Google Earth Engine, we’re helping companies with responsible management of natural resources, while also building sustainable business practices,” she said.

Satellite-derived Earth Engine image showing seasonal agricultural peak near the Columbia River and Snake Rivers in Washington. The fields in the middle are soy and corn that mature in different months.Image Credits Google Cloud

The company also announced an audacious goal to be completely carbon-energy free — not carbon neutral, but carbon-energy free — by 2030, an especially difficult challenge when you start dealing with downstream product usage.

To track these goals, one of their internal tools is the 24/7 carbon-free energy insights programThis week, the company will begin a pilot program to make this product available to customers.

Maud Texier, head of energy development at Google, says that if the company was the only one to try and meet such a goal, it wouldn’t have much meaning, so they decided to share their insights and learnings with others along the way in the hope that, whether you are Google Cloud customers or not, you can take advantage of the big company’s work.

“​​24/7 is about sparking a movement of organizations that take an interest into grids where they operate. The ultimate goal is to reduce electricity usage for everyone. So for the past 10 years, and together with our partners, we’ve collected insights and knowledge about how to progress your business towards a carbon-free energy future,” Texier said.

Bennett says she knows they aren’t there yet, and that’s part of the reason for laying out such an ambitious goal, but the 24/7 program is about sharing information to help other organizations trying to achieve similar goals. “The thing that I think is really important about 2030 is that it’s about setting a bold mission and enabling a whole bunch of really smart engineers to try to come up with creative and innovative solutions to [climate change] problems,” she said.

Justin Keeble is the managing director of global sustainability at Google Cloud. He says that the company has introduced Carbon Sense. SuiteLast year, we created a Google Cloud account to help customers understand how much carbon they used. This now includes both Scope OneAnd Scope ThreeScope Two will be added to the list in the coming weeks. Customers will also be able to select “Low Carbon Mode,” which restricts their Google Cloud usage to lower carbon emissions data centers.

The company also makes it easier to measure carbon emissions from non-Google products. “We’re also excited to launch a dedicated IAM (integrated access model) role for carbon footprint. This will enable those non-Google Cloud users to easily access the emissions data and use it for tracking or in disclosures,” Keeble explained.

Bennett said that they are only just getting started and that their ultimate goal is to create a base set sustainability services that can be used by partners, such as professional service firms like Accenture or Deloitte, systems integrators, or independent companies to build solutions on top.

“We’ve launched a marketplace where our partners can build ISV solutions that maybe make it easier for enterprises to adopt [sustainability initiatives]You can move faster, but still have the foundation of the [Google Cloud] platform underneath,” Bennett said.

These announcements represent a wide range of initiatives. The ultimate goal is to be an sustainability platform where Google Cloud shares what it has learned while also providing tools for companies to understand and take action on their own data and climate initiatives.