Google’s ‘dragonscale’ solar-powered roof signals growing demand for sustainable workspaces

About 40 miles south of San Francisco, three futuristic structures rise from the earth. With sloping roofs clad in thousands of overlapping tiles, the buildings could be mistaken for the world's most architecturally advanced circus tent.

They are, in fact, part of Google's new Bay View campus, which is due to welcome employees this year - pandemic allowing - and is situated a few miles east of its existing HQ campus in Mountain View.

The firm says the finished buildings will have 90,000 tiles which form a "solar skin" roof, which its designers have named "dragonscale" and estimate will generate almost 7 megawatts of energy or 40% of the electricity needs of the campus. It sees this as part of its efforts to hit the pledge made by CEO Sundar Pichai that Google will run every data center and campus on carbon-free energy by 2030.

Corporations have never been under more pressure to follow through and make meaningful progress on carbon emissions from regulators and amid greater scrutiny around "greenwashing" from environmentalists - and their own employees.

Demand for low-emission offices is larger than it ever has been, according to several US architects the Guardian spoke to. That's especially true in California, where manifestations of the climate crisis are obvious: hotter summers, drought and an annual wildfire season.

"Buildings are awful for the environment," said Eric Corey Freed, the sustainability director at architecture firm CannonDesign. "If we're going to solve climate change, we have to fix our buildings."

In the US, buildings consumed around 40% of the country's electricity in 2020, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration, and are also one of the planet's biggest emitters of greenhouse gasses, accounting for 37% of the world's energy-related CO2 emissions. That's not including all the emissions from refrigerants - chemicals that maintain air conditioning systems and refrigerators - which have a global warming potential that's hundreds to thousands of times higher than carbon dioxide.