GOOGLE Inc. plans a solar-powered electricity system at its Silicon Valley headquarters that will rank as the largest U.S. solar-powered corporate office complex.

　　The Web search leader said it is set to begin building a rooftop solar-powered generation system at its Mountain View, California, headquarters capable of generating 1.6 megawatts of electricity, or enough to power 1,000 California homes.

　　“This is the largest customer-owned solar electric system at a corporate site,” said Noah Kaye, director of public affairs at the Solar Energy Industries Association, an industry group based in Washington, D.C.

　　A Google executive said the company would rely on solar power to supply nearly a third of the electricity consumed by office workers at its roughly one-million-square-foot headquarters. This excludes power consumed by data centers that power many of Google’s Web services worldwide, he said.

　　Radcliffe, vice president of real estate at Google, declined to comment on the cost of the project or whether the solar generation equipment might pay for itself over time. “We wanted to dispel the myth that you can’t be both Green and profitable,” he said.

　　Most of the solar panels will sit on the rooftops of office buildings in the Googleplex -- the pet name for the site. Others will provide shaded parking as part of newly constructed solar-panel canopies over existing Google car parking lots. 

　　Earlier this year, Google rival Microsoft got the jump on Google with a 2,288-panel solar system at its research site in Mountain View that is expected to produce 480 kilowatts at peak capacity, the first large-scale use of solar power at any Microsoft office worldwide.

　　The world’s largest dedicated solar-powered generation station is a 12-megawatt facility in Arnstein, Germany, near Frankfurt. The top U.S. dedicated solar facility generates 4.6 megawatts and sits in the Arizona desert near Tucson.