Watt’s the best time to compute? Google’s road to the Edelman Award

Published: April 12, 2026

This latest episode in the mini-series highlighting the 2026 Franz Edelman Award finalist featues members of the team from Google, whose project is advancing a new approach to managing energy and computing resources across the company’s global data center network.

Data centers power the digital services we rely on every day, but they also require enormous amounts of energy. To address this challenge, Google developed a first-of-its-kind system that intelligently shifts flexible computing workloads across both time and location to take advantage of cleaner energy sources.

In this episode, we’ll hear more about how this innovative system works and the impact it’s having.

I think that the possibility to do something like this, it has been a great journey. And it's when you have a great idea that affects everybody in the world it’s just right and the right team, you know, nothing is actually hard. And it's not getting the team, that the idea gets together the people and the teamwork can really move and change the strategy of a large company like Google. And yeah, this is something that still like is unbelievable, probably for us that this happened and the impact that we created. On the other hand, it makes us proud. And, you know, we can give this story to other data scientists, other engineers, and I think this is a great inspirational story for their own ideas.

Interviewed this episode:

Ana Radovanovic, Walfredo Cirne, and Adriaan Hilbers

Google

Ana Radovanovic is a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google. She currently serves as the Technical Lead for Energy Analytics and Carbon Aware Computing, where she focuses on decarbonizing the electricity grid and improving the energy efficiency of Google’s data centers.

Walfredo Cirneis a Principal Engineer at Google, where he has worked since 2006. He is currently part of the Technical Infrastructure Group at Google’s headquarters.

Adriaan Hilbers is a Data Scientist at Google, where he focuses on optimizing energy applications and improving the efficiency of data centers.