In 2010 Google Energy made its first investment in a renewable-energy project, putting up US$38.8 million for two wind farms in North Dakota.

[7] In April 2011, Google extended its partnership with NextEra by signing a 20-year power purchase agreement (PPA) for its Minco II Wind Energy Center.

To help solve this problem, last year DeepMind started building algorithms to boost the efficacy of Google's wind farms in the US, it said in a blog post.

It trained a neural network on weather forecasts and past turbine data, so it could predict power output 36 hours ahead.

While it's only been built and tested out internally so far, it's not hard to imagine Google hoping to sell this technology to wind farm operators.