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Welcome to the Experts Only Podcast sponsored by CleanCapital, where we explore the intersection of energy, innovation and finance. Our host is CleanCapital’s co-founder and former Federal Chief Sustainability Officer John Powers. Learn how CleanCapital is revolutionizing clean energy finance, and find more episodes at cleancapital.com, iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you like what you hear, be sure to subscribe and leave us a five star review.

Jon Powers:

Welcome to this week’s episode of CleanCapital’s Experts Only Podcast. Today we have a fascinating conversation with Kate Brandt, who is the leader for sustainability at Google. In this conversation we really talk about how tech can be an enabler for sustainability. And talk through some of the challenges and opportunities Kate sees working for Google, the largest corporate procurer of renewable energy in the world, and what they’re seeing across their facilities like their data centers, what they’re doing with their data in agriculture and other really interesting spaces.

Jon Powers:

Kate, thank you so much for joining us on CleanCapital’s Experts Only Podcast. I want to talk to you a little bit about your journey in sustainability. You’ve had a really unique career track from Brown University, the Obama campaign, working at the White House, the Pentagon, and even at Department of Energy, and now of course at Google. Can you talk to the audience a little bit about your personal journey and what motivated you to want to be in sustainability?

Kate Brandt:

Yeah, absolutely. And thanks so much for having me on the podcast, John, it’s always great to get the chance to talk with you so it’s good to be here. So on my journey I really trace back my interest in this space to where I grew up actually. So I grew up here in Northern California in a small beach town called Muir Beach, the namesake of John Muir. And I got to grow up spending a lot of time outside, was in a community surrounded by national and state park land, and I developed this really deep appreciation for the environment and conservation. And so it’s something that I’ve always really had a longstanding passion for. And when I came up through undergrad and grad school, I got really interested in the topic of energy security and climate security, and the role of national resources in foreign policy and national security issues.

Kate Brandt:

So after grad school I worked on the Obama campaign in Florida and moved to DC, was very lucky to find a place in the Obama administration early on and started at the White House in the Office of Energy and Climate Change. And then moved over to the Pentagon where of course we had the chance to work together.

Jon Powers:

Absolutely.

Kate Brandt:

And I was the Energy Advisor to the Secretary of the Navy, and through that work really got to dig in on energy security and climate security. How we were fueling the fleet, looking at advanced biofuels, but also working on sustainability for the Navy and Marine Corps hundred military installations around the world. And there really got to cut my teeth on not only energy and natural resources issues, but also how are we thinking about water and waste and the fleet and procurement. And so that’s kind of where I really fell in love with the sustainability work and then was lucky enough to go on to be a senior advisor at Department of Energy. And then of course lucky enough to succeed you at the White House as the Federal Chief of Sustainability.

Jon Powers:

Well, you had big shoes to fill there.

Kate Brandt:

I had huge shoes to fill. It was a tough job, John. But standing on the shoulders of giants as I always say.

Jon Powers:

I’m going to get into some of the work you’re doing at Google, of course. But before doing that, you worked for one of the real true leaders Secretary Mabus who came into the Navy at a time where much of the military… I saw this when I was working at the army. Had no energy policy or some developing climate policy. You really saw it go from that to establishing gigawatt goals and now we’re seeing power purchase agreements that are saving hundreds of millions of dollars to the taxpayers. Talk a little bit about what it was like to see that first hand and working with someone like Mabus, and how to take those sort of high level, some could say almost impossible to achieve, goals and actually achieving them.

Kate Brandt:

Yeah. I felt so lucky to be able to serve at the Pentagon when I did and when we did. So I started there the end of August of 2009 and Secretary of Mabus had recently become the Secretary of the Navy, and it was so interesting talking to him about how he initially got focused on this issue. Because as you point out, it hadn’t been as much of a focus prior to that time. And he has such an interesting background, he was a Gulf State Governor, Governor of Mississippi. He had been the Ambassador to Saudi Arabia in the Clinton administration. And then as he was preparing for his confirmation to be the Secretary of the Navy, the issue of energy security kept arising as he would tell it in all of his briefings. And he saw that this was just a thread that ran throughout and that this was an area that both really posed potential threat and risk, but also that there was a huge opportunity. And really carrying on the very long tradition of how the Navy has really always innovated how it powers the fleet, of going from sail to coal and coal to oil and then nuclear, and now we’ve also moved towards biofuels. And I think that there’s a great tradition, of course, of innovation in the military, and I think there was this huge opportunity to also innovate around energy and how we power our forces.

Kate Brandt:

So it was a tremendous time to be there and, as you’ll recall, a time when policy got a bit stuck on Capitol Hill with cap and trade when there were some disappointments that happened during the climate negotiations in Copenhagen, and it was really powerful to see how the Department of Defense really picked up the mantle and drove a tremendous amount of innovation. As you point out the three gigawatt commitment across the three services, the commitment that was ultimately met to certify all ships and planes and other military vehicles on advanced biofuels, and the tremendous amount of work that was done to really drive sustainability strategies across military installations for basically small cities. So I think a tremendous amount has happened, continues to happen, and then it was an honor to be a part of it.

Jon Powers:

So I’ve talked before about the difference between an entrepreneur and an intrapreneur. You’ve worked in major bureaucracies like the Pentagon, I think some would argue probably the biggest bureaucracy in the world, and now you’re working for an amazing company. I mean you’ve gone in and helped disrupt them, but why do you see yourself as an intrapreneur and what lessons can you share with the audience about what you’ve found that’s worked doing that?

Kate Brandt:

Yeah. I’ve always liked working inside of big organizations, as you point out I’ve been at the Pentagon, and the role that we both had at the White House, worked across all the different federal agencies, and of course now at Google we’re a 72,000 person company around the world. And I think for me there’s a huge amount of opportunity when large organizations such as these really are motivated to drive change around sustainability, around clean energy. Their impact can be tremendous, and I feel really lucky that I’ve had the chance to work on clean energy and sustainability issues inside of these large organizations that really can move the needle. Of course the Department of Defense is the largest energy user in the world, and by that token so is the federal government. At Google we’ve been able to do incredible things as a corporate renewable power buyer. So I really feel lucky to have had the chance to work inside of these large organizations that can really have tremendous positive impact when it comes to the environment.

Jon Powers:

Yeah, so let’s talk about impact a little bit. Google, and everyone is obviously very familiar with Google, and if you’re not then you’re probably not listen to a podcast anyways. What is the role of these large tech companies who are really leading the charge on sustainability? Why is it unique, and why do you think they can make an impact?

Kate Brandt:

Yeah. I mean one of the reasons that I got really excited to come and do this work at Google is that we both get to work on sustainability issues, both from an operational perspective but also we really get to sit at this intersection point between technology and sustainability. And so I think in both instances there’s a huge amount of opportunity. So on the operational side at Google, we’ve been at this truly since our founding 19 years ago. So we just celebrated the 10 year anniversary of operating as a carbon neutral company. In 2012-

Jon Powers:

Really?

Kate Brandt:

Yeah. Yeah. So this is the 10 year anniversary. So back in 2007, some very bold and inspiring leaders we had inside the company said, “This is the way that we should be operating. We want to be completely neutralizing our impact on the planet from a carbon perspective”. So laid out this strategy, sort of three part. Of course first focusing on energy efficiency and we have this very long standing practice of designing our data centers, which are really kind of the core of our footprint, we have 14 data centers around the world. So we’ve been really focused on designing those data centers from the ground up with efficiency in mind. All of the systems inside the data centers and the computing itself, the servers themselves. Also really with a deep interest in renewable energy. And of course back in 2007 when we set this goal, we didn’t have access to the kind of large scale renewable purchases that we’ve been able to make since then. But we still had that ambition. We knew we wanted to run on renewable energy as much as possible. And then lastly, carbon offsets. That’s also always been a part of our strategy.

Kate Brandt:

So fast forward 10 years, we’ve been at this for a long time and we were also able to announce in December that this year in 2017 we will reach our hundred percent renewable energy goal. So at Google, of course, we have the tremendous opportunity for impact through our operations. But also, like I said, to really think about how can technology be an enabler. And so a couple areas that I think are incredibly powerful. One is cloud computing. So there’s been some really powerful research that’s been done by UC Berkeley and others about the power of switching from running your email and your docs off of a locally hosted server. We’ve all seen these server closets down the hall with the flashing lights and putting all of that work into the cloud. And so this study that UC Berkeley did basically hypothesized that if every US office worker shifted over to the cloud, we’d see 65 to 85% reduction in energy in carbon emissions associated with computing. Enough power to power for LA for a year.

Jon Powers:

And that takes an account’s the-

Kate Brandt:

It’s a really huge opportunity.

Jon Powers:

Need for new data centers to address that?

Kate Brandt:

Yeah. Yeah. So really a powerful case for the efficiency associated with cloud computing. And then also we are of course very excited about the role of AI and machine learning and we’ve been experimenting with that in our own operations. So we have done some work applying a machine learning algorithm to our data center cooling systems. And we had a great young engineer that started as a side project, we have these things we will call it 20% projects. So this guy Jim Gow, he said, “Hey, I’m really interested in machine learning”. Took a class on the side, pitched a 20% project and started investigating machine learning for the data center. And a big part of the energy use in the data center is cooling because servers get really hot, you got to keep them cool. And we had been focused on optimizing that process since we started building data centers over 10 years ago now. But with the machine learning algorithm, once it learned all the systems and how to optimize across them, we saw a 40% reduction in the energy use to cool the data center and overall 15-

Jon Powers:

40%?

Kate Brandt:

Yeah, for cooling. And an overall 15% reduction in the energy use of the whole data center. So tremendously exciting outcome, obviously for us ability to be even more efficient to pass that efficiency on to our customers. But also I think really gives you a window into this huge potential opportunity that machine learning and AI presents for the environment, for sustainability.

Jon Powers:

So I’m just going to double down on what you just said because I think noting from something you actually said earlier this month, you take that and marry it to some of the projections that have data centers consuming as much as 13% of the world’s electricity by 2030. We look at machine learning at CleanCapital but in a different way, but in a way that can really drive reduction across that. That demand is incredible. So I’m going to talk a little bit more, I’m going to move off of energy even though that’s something I am very interested in, but don’t want to leave without talking briefly about the hundred percent renewable energy goal you guys have had. And obviously the fact that you’re hitting it is amazing. Can you talk just a little bit about how that’s happening across sort of the corporate procurement process and how you guys are managing that?

Kate Brandt:

Yeah, so we have an incredible team that is dedicated to purchasing all of our power, both ground power and green power, and we are now the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy in the world. So since 2010, when we started working on this, we’ve signed 20 agreements for a total of 2.6 gigawatts of energy. So that’s about as much power as it takes to power the city of San Francisco for a year.

Jon Powers:

Wow.

Kate Brandt:

So very significant commitment. And we’ve calculated kind of emission savings equivalent to taking about 1.2 million cars off the road. So massive under taking. And in 2012, once we had been at this for a little while, we said we really think our aspirations should be a hundred percent renewable. And frankly, at that time as we all know, there was not a clear path to get there. This was really a moonshot goal for us. But both through our team really doing incredibly innovative work in power purchase agreements, as well as we have a fantastic policy team that really thinks about how do we use our demand to help drive positive change that makes clean energy more accessible to everyone. And so they’ve worked on green tariffs, they’ve worked on other policy structures, and here we find ourselves in 2017 and we’re poised to reach our hundred percent renewable energy goal for our global operations.

Kate Brandt:

And so what that means for us is we really see this as a major milestone. This is our first a hundred percent, but also we don’t want to stop here. So this milestone that we’ll reach this year means, on an annual basis, we’re purchasing as much renewable energy as we’re consuming globally. And where we want to move towards is what we kind of think of as our next a hundred percent, of also consuming the same amount of renewable in the regions where we’re operating so that we have a closer connection to that renewable power.

Jon Powers:

More localized. Yeah, absolutely.

Kate Brandt:

Yeah, exactly. And then ultimately we’re really interested in how can we get to the point where we’re operating 24/7 on clean energy at our data centers? So obviously a much more ambitious goal that we’re really just in the early stages of digging into, but as much as we want to celebrate this milestone we also feel like there’s a lot more work to do and we have a great team to carry that forward.

Jon Powers:

So for an audience note here, I am going to talk to Mike Terrell from Google at some point about the policy effort around this because it’s pretty amazing.

Kate Brandt:

That’s great.

Jon Powers:

Mike, if you’re listening, you don’t know this yet but you and I are talking about this. We were just on a panel together recently.

Kate Brandt:

That’s fabulous. Yeah, and Michael’s a crucial member of the Google team and has been at this for a long time and has done some really groundbreaking work in the policy space.

Jon Powers:

So let’s flip out of the pure energy piece and I want to talk broadly about sustainability because you guys have so much cool things going on. But before doing that, you talked about these ambitious sort of moonshot goals that Google has not only set but in many cases achieved. How does Google internalize the leadership at the company to achieve those goals? It’s one thing to say, we want to get this done, it’s another thing to actually achieve that moonshot.

Kate Brandt:

Yeah. I think the thing that I’ve found really powerful about joining this team, I’ve been at Google for a little over two years now, is just how much our value around sustainability and how much our focus on it has grown up inside of the company. That has truly been a focus for us since our founding. And I think what’s really powerful about that is that sustainability has grown up inside all of these different parts of our business. And as we have grown into an over 70,000 person global company we have dedicated sustainability teams that are embedded in the key parts of our business that are doing this work. So whether it’s on our real estate team, our data center team, our consumer hardware team, we have people that are focused on doing this work. And so when we set these goals I think we really want to be ambitious, but we also feel like we have the partnership with the business to really achieve them.

Kate Brandt:

So one of the goals that we set more recently that I think is also a moonshot that we’re actually really making some great progress on is to reach zero waste to landfill operations for our global data centers. So I mentioned 14 data centers around the world, this is kind of the core of our operations as a company. And we said, “We really want to do this in a way where we’re using a zero waste to landfill goal to really innovate how we think about materials, how we think about closing loops, designing waste out of our systems”. So we have made some really good progress towards reaching that goal already. We’re at 86% now and we have one data center and Pryor Oklahoma that’s gotten there. But this has been equally a really important journey for us and really connected to our focus on the circular economy and how we really change our relationship to natural resources.

Jon Powers:

Fascinating. I mean it’s interesting for folks that haven’t visited the site, you should go to environment.google, which sort of highlights a lot of the amazing stuff that you guys have going on. And hearing that you’ve got sustainability teams embedded across the different business lines, it’s helpful because when you look at environment.google you’re touching so many different spaces. Whether it be using data to track a illegal fishing, we’ve already talked about sort of a machine learning and data centers, obviously the renewable energy piece, but what’s going on in Google cafes with localized farming. I think I want to talk a little bit about the healthy building efforts and what’s happening within your own facilities, but then how you’re also sort of working to take some of that knowledge and share it across other sectors. What do you sort of see, because there’s so much happening there, what is your greatest challenge that are just implementing across such a broad strategy?

Kate Brandt:

I think for us we are so lucky because we have this structure where we really have experts embedded in the different parts of the company that we can use that as our greatest strength to both really be innovative, but also see where do we have potential risks or where might we be needing to really double down? So you mentioned some of the work that we’ve been doing in our real estate portfolio. So there we have been very focused on a couple of areas where I think we’re doing some really innovative work.

Kate Brandt:

One of which you just referred to is food waste. So we of course operate cafes for our employees. We’re very lucky, we get to have if we want three meals a day at work, and we really want to make sure that we’re doing that in an incredibly responsible way. And so we’ve been focused on composting, recycling, but also we really wanted to think about how do we prevent food waste in what we call the pre-consumer setting, in how we’re actually preparing food in the kitchen. So our food team is partnered with this great technology company and I think this is another great example of sort of using technology to drive sustainability benefit. This great technology company called Leanpath, they’re based up in Oregon, and they have a system that brings a scale and a camera into the kitchen and then our chefs will weigh and take pictures of the food waste that’s happening in the kitchen so they can identify where are items expiring, or where are we seeing that we’re not utilizing as much as we could of a vegetable or of a meat. And then they can do better menu planning, they can do better purchasing. And so through this tool we avoided 1.5 million pounds of food waste just last year.

Jon Powers:

Wow.

Kate Brandt:

And we haven’t even deployed it yet across our full global fleet of cafes. So really incredible opportunity. And we’re now even thinking about how could we potentially take that whole set of images that we have that have been taken by Leanpath and then apply machine learning to get even deeper insights into how we could optimize. So that’s a tremendously, I think, innovative space.

Kate Brandt:

And then also you mentioned healthy materials. So we have had a very long standing focus on thinking about how do we build healthy, happy places for our employees? How do we build places where our employees will really thrive and be at their best? And so a piece of that for us has always been thinking about what materials are we bringing into our built environment, and I think sometimes people are surprised to learn that actually some of the stuff that we bring inside, it can be nasty. It can have formaldehyde and other chemicals in it. And so our team has been thinking about how do we get the healthiest materials possible into our offices? So again, we’ve come up with a technology solution and we’ve built this tool called Portico with a partner called The Healthy Building Network. And Portico enables our building project teams to collaborate with one another on getting the best information possible about what’s in the stuff we’re bringing to our offices, whether that’s furniture, or paint, or carpet. And then it’s also a tool through which we can inquire with our suppliers to tell us, “Hey, what’s in this stuff?” so we can be making the most informed decisions.

Kate Brandt:

And so we’ve now used this tool in over 200 projects around the world and have built out a tremendous database of information. And then last year we brought in several new partners, Harvard, and Durst, and Perkins & Wills, major developers, to think about how do we make this tool accessible to everyone? And so that’s what we’re working on now.

Jon Powers:

That’s amazing. I remember when I first heard about this a few years ago it was living in a Google Sheet online. And to think that data has now transferred into a usable tool that folks are actually implementing this incredible.

Kate Brandt:

Yeah.

Jon Powers:

Before finishing up here, I really want to highlight on I think some of the things you’ve talked about more publicly recently and the concept of the circular economy and how it’s going to be important to sustainability in the long run. And obviously I completely agree with you, but I really want to hear how you think that applies to the tech sector. You’re living in Silicon Valley, you’re surrounded by some of the most innovative companies in the world. How do you see not just the companies, but even the VCs and others adopting the concept of the circular economy and sort of trying to implement that in their own operations?

Kate Brandt:

Yeah, so this is a topic that I’ve become really passionate about. And kind of the way that I think about the circular economy fundamentally is we’ve had this model since the industrial revolution in which we take something out of the ground, we burn it for fuel or we turn it into a product, and they ultimately gets thrown away or it gets vented into the atmosphere, and that this is not a sustainable path that we can follow. I really like some work that has been done via a local NGO here, The Global Footprint Network, they every year calculate Earth Overshoot Day, which essentially when have we exhausted our natural resources budget for the year. And lately it’s been falling in August, which basically means that for the rest of the year, we’re operating in a deficit. We’re using natural resources that can’t be replenished or emitting carbon into the atmosphere that can’t be reabsorbed. So basically we need 1.7 earths to continue to operate just at the level of capacity we are at today. And then you think about how much growth that we anticipate in the future, and it’s truly an unsustainable model.

Kate Brandt:

So I’m really interested in how do we turn that on its head? And I think that’s really what circular economy offers. It’s a completely new solution where we don’t think about this linear approach, but rather we think about how do you take a more restorative and regenerative perspective on the use of natural resources, on how we design our systems. And I think that there is a huge role for business to play in this, and particularly I think there’s a tremendous role for technology.

Kate Brandt:

And we just published a paper a few weeks ago with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which is a great NGO out in the UK that we do a lot of work with on the circular economy. And in this paper we started to look at this topic of what is the role of technology, particularly in a more circular city? As your listeners I’m sure know, there’s a lot of interest right now in the city scale. Of how can cities really be innovative in this space? And we really see the city scale as also being really interesting from a circular economy perspective. Since we have more people living in cities all the time, we now have more people globally living in cities than not. So we wrote this paper that really looks at some of the technologies that we already have today at Google that can help to drive more circular cities. So that’s everything from the work that we’ve been doing through a tool called Project Sunroof, this is a tool that we launched a couple of years ago that enables any homeowner in the US and also in Germany to go in type in your address, see if your roof is a good candidate for a solar, and then how much could you save and take the next step to connect with a solar developer.

Kate Brandt:

And that tool also enables whole communities to assess their solar potential. So you can see a whole city, they have the ability now to use that tool to think about how can they use a more renewable source of power to power their city. And we also talk in that paper about the work we’ve been doing around air quality at the community scale. So we have a team that’s working on this project Air View, which is a partnership with the Environmental Defense Fund, with the EDF, and a technology company here in the Bay Area called Aclima. And what we’ve been doing is attaching air quality sensors to our street view cars.

Jon Powers:

Oh yeah.

Kate Brandt:

These are those kind of fun looking Google cars that drive around, they create Google maps. Well also we can attach these air quality sensors so they can be sensing air quality on a street by street basis.

Jon Powers:

Wow.

Kate Brandt:

And so over the summer we released this data set that was looking at air quality in Oakland, and through the maps that EDF did that showed this data you could see from street to street how air quality was changing. How people getting off the Bay Bridge or onto Interstate 80 was impacting air quality at the community level and really giving people tools to try and build more healthy communities. So we see a really tremendous role for technology in driving the circular cities of the future.

Jon Powers:

That’s amazing. So we’ve had quite a conversation, so first of all thank you. And I always ask sort of a final question to folks. When you look back at your career, obviously you already established a very solid career and you’ve got a long way to go going forward, but if you went and sat down with yourself coming out of high school or even college, what advice would you give yourself?

Kate Brandt:

I always like to tell folks that I think it’s so important to follow your passion. I feel so lucky that every day I’ve had the chance to get up and go to work and really work on something that I’m passionate about, and to do an incredible amount of learning through my work. Obviously I feel really grateful for the great education I received, but I have learned so much from the incredible people that I’ve gotten to work with over the years. From consulting with experts, from reading as much as I can. I’m a big fan of really taking the time to figure out what you’re passionate about and then really digging in and taking the chance to learn, and then making sure that if you’re not as excited about what you’re doing finding your next challenge and your next opportunity.

Jon Powers:

Outstanding. Well thank you Kate, and thank you so much for joining us.

Kate Brandt:

Thank you so much for having me. It’s been great to be with you.

Jon Powers:

Look forward to seeing you next time I’m out west.

Kate Brandt:

Sounds great. Looking forward to it.

Jon Powers:

Thank you to Kate Brandt for joining us. Once again, go to environment.google to keep up to speed on the amazing work that they’ve got going on. And I want to send a special thanks out to our producers, Emily Connor and Lauren Glickman. The show wouldn’t be possible without them. Please go to CleanCapital.com if you have ideas for future episodes. And of course, please leave us a five star rating wherever you hear your podcasts. We look forward to continuing the conversation with you in the future. Thanks.