Apple isn’t the only tech giant making waves on the renewal energy front. Google is making a big commitment to wind power, enough to provide its Mountain View, Calif.-based headquarters with enough electricity for their operations.

My colleague, Jaikumar Vijayan, over at eWEEK reports:

As part of the agreement, NextEra will install new turbines at its wind farm in California’s Altamont Pass that will generate an estimated 43 megawatts of electricity starting 2016. NextEra will flow the energy through the section of the California power grid that supplies electricity to Google’s headquarters. The company will measure the output from NextEra’s turbines against the electricity consumption at the datacenter to ensure that its energy needs are being completely offset by the wind farm.

“We think this project is especially cool because back in the 1980’s, the golden hills of Altamont Pass were an early test bed for the first large-scale wind power technology in the U.S…. Once the installation is complete, and the 370 legacy turbines are replaced, it will take just 24 new ones to generate as much power as our campus uses in a year,” wrote David Radcliffe, vice president of Google Real Estate and Workplace Services, in a blog post.

The news comes just as First Solar announced that Apple is spending an unprecedented $848 million to help fund a solar farm.

“The 2,900-acre California Flats Solar Project occupies 3 percent of a property owned by Hearst Corporation in Cholame, Calif. Construction is expected to begin in mid-2015, and to be completed by the end of 2016. The output of the remaining 150MW of the project will be sold to Pacific Gas & Electric under a separate long-term PPA [power purchase agreement], and the project is fully subscribed between the Apple and PG&E PPAs, said First Solar in a statement.

Image Credit: Google Green Blog