Google Earth Engine Added to Company's Sustainability Solutions

Google Earth engine has been made generally available on Google Cloud for use by all its customers, including enterprise business customers in tracking changes in habitats and and ecosystems over time. The solution combines satellite, publicly available, geospatial, and internal data so that customers can visualize the impact of their materials use across operational ecosystems. Google Earth was originally launched in 2010 and, prior to today, limited to use by scientists and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

Google continues its push to develop a suite of sustainability solutions

With this latest solution addition, Google adds to its sustainability portfolio, a combination  of new applications and enhancements to existing tools. Other significant applications include Carbon Sense Suite, Sustainability Hub marketplace, and Google Public Sector, a separate entity focused on federal, stale, and local governments. Google also plans to make its internal tracking program and technologies available to customers beginning this week. 

Implications for industrial sustainability and energy transition

Google has impressive capabilities in big data, analytics, and machine learning, core applications necessary identify, reduce, and report on emissions and other climate-change related challenges facing industrial organizations. Additionally, those solutions will become increasingly critical as industry sectors and companies adopt more transparent climate-related financial disclosure, such as those laid out the the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosure (TCFD).  However, the company still has some work to do to increase use by industrial customers who are, at the moment, adopting rivals AWS and Microsoft Azure more frequently. That was evident during the Google Cloud Sustainability Summit, where the company discussed its solutions as well as the organizations significant commitment to be carbon-energy free (not neutral) by 2030. Most use cases were focused on lighter asset- and energy-intensity operations than heavy industry. However, examples were provided in support of agriculture and consumer-packaged goods. 

Google is likely to make market penetration headway around one of the critical challenges encountered when planning and implementing energy transition and industrial sustainability strategies - complexity and dependencies of quantifying improved sustainability performance. Sustainability and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goal setting are requiring companies to think well beyond their own business footprint, due to the cross-industry nature of the related challenges. While industrial companies can likely identify and improve low-hanging fruit associated with scope 1 emissions, and 2 to a degree, the difficulty of holistically managing and reporting these emissions, especially scope 3, is daunting. The associated data complexity will dwarf related business improvements already underway via digital transformation initiatives. In addition to its established big data management capabilities, Google is likely to be able to provide a solid set of tools around process areas such as supply chain and fleet electrification and management, as well as circular economy adoption. For more complex operational and production issues, the company is likely to lean on its partner community, at least for the near future.