Google Energy, a subsidiary of the search engine giant, has signed a deal to purchase 114 megawatts of energy from a wind farm in Iowa.

Google Senior Vice President of Operations Urs Hoelzle said in a blog post that “buying wind energy is part of the company’s efforts to reduce it’s carbon footprints and operate as a carbon neutral company.

“By contracting to purchase so much energy for so long, we’re giving the developer of the wind farm financial certainty to build additional clean energy projects. The inability of renewable energy developers to obtain financing has been a significant inhibitor to the expansion of renewable energy,” Hoelzle said.

In May the company invested $38.8 million into two wind farms in North Dakota. The investment in the North Dakota wind farms is not related to its Google Energy subsidiary, according to a company representative. Google does expect a return on the investment and also enhance Google’s desire to further clean-energy adoption.

Analysts also think that Google’s investment in wind energy will help bolster the wind energy industry as a whole. Many banks and investment firms have drastically scaled back their investments in renewable energy projects. The cutbacks have severely limited the ability of new projects to be initiated as well as the completion of existing ones.

Google also has developed the Google PowerMeter, a web based device that gathers data from smart meters or home electricity monitors and displays that data on a PC or smartphone, which helps people better understand electricity usage and how to cut power usage.

Google also operates a fleet of electric cars in it’s RechargeIT project. The project’s aim is to promote electric cars and educate the public about hybrid electric vehicles.

Google has made other investments in renewable energy companies. One is eSolar, a company that uses small, flat mirrors that track the sun and reflects the heat to a tower mounted receiver. The heat is used to boil water to produce steam which operates  a traditional  turbine and generator to produce solar electricity.

Another company is AltaRock Energy, a company that has developed a method to extract geothermal energy from bedrock in the earth.