We are please to have Sam Arons of Google as the next speaker in the Fall 2014 Sustainable Futures Speaker Series. He will speak on Thursday, October 2 from 5:30 to 7:00 PM in Behavioral and Social Sciences Building room 166 (BSS 166) on the HSU campus. The title of his talk is “Scaling Renewable Energy: A Perspective from Google.”

For the past seven years, Sam has held a variety of roles at Google focused on sustainability and renewable energy. He has led a number of initiatives on the sustainability front, including calculating Google's global carbon footprint and implementing a feature in the Google Finance product to show companies' carbon scores. Sam is currently a member of the Global Infrastructure team at Google where, as part of the team's mission to execute a global data center strategy, he helps lead the development and implementation of the company's global renewable energy strategy. Key efforts of the team include managing the company's energy portfolio and sourcing as much renewable energy as possible to power Google's data centers. Recent examples of the team's success include negotiating a utility agreement for up to 407 MW of wind power in Iowa, closing a long-term power purchase agreement for 239 MW of wind power in the Texas panhandle, and signing a 72 MW wind power purchase agreement in Sweden to supply Google’s Hamina, Finland datacenter. Prior to joining Google, Sam earned a B.A. in Physics from Williams College and an M.S. in Energy and Resources from UC Berkeley, where his research focused on wind energy and plug-in vehicles, respectively.