Technology giant Google on Tuesday announced that it would attain its goal of running entirely on renewable energy by 2017, a year ahead of schedule.

Google claims that it was one of the first corporations to enter a large-scale, long-term contract to buy renewable energy by signing an agreement to purchase the electricity from an 114-megawatt wind farm in Iowa in 2010. Moreover, the tech giant has also made a commitment to buy more than 2.6 gigawatts (2,600 megawatts) of wind and solar energy.

Urs Hölzle, the senior vice president of Technical Infrastructure at Google, wrote in a recent blogpost that Google takes an incredible amount of technical power, and thus energy, to power trillions of searches on its website every year and 400 hours of YouTube uploads every minute. While Google data centers have been made 50 percent more energy efficient by the company's engineers in comparison to the industry average, the search engine giant still needs a lot of energy to keep its products and services running.

The cost of wind and solar has reduced by 60 and 80 percent respectively over the last six years. Therefore, Google's decision to switch completely to renewable energy makes sense, considering this option is long-term and stable.

In 2015, Google entered into six new agreements totaling 842 megawatts, which is the largest aggregate purchase of renewable energy ever made by a non-utility company. Till date, Google has made 20 agreements to purchase renewable energy.

Google intends to broaden its purchases to a variety of other renewable power sources.

"Our ultimate goal is to create a world where everyone - not just Google - has access to clean energy," the company said.

With such moves, Google aims to reduce carbon footprint and tackle climate change.

To know more, visit Google's new environment website where the company keeps users updated about the steps it takes to tackle climate change globally.