The company will spend millions to make renewable energy cheaper than coal.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
By Kevin Bullis
Yesterday Google announced a new renewable-energy initiative. While the press release is a little unclear about how it will play out, the initiative will pour tens of millions of dollars into developing cheap, clean energy next year. It's not just philanthropy. In the coming years, the company also hopes to spend hundreds of millions on clean-energy investments that will make a lot of money.
The goal is to drive down the cost of renewable energy, making it less expensive than even coal, the cheapest source of electricity. A number of other companies have also been working on this.
In a deft public-relations maneuver, Google's huge, energy-hungry data centers have been transformed from an environmental liability into a basis for making the company an environmental leader. Here's a bit from the press release:
"We have gained expertise in designing and building large-scale, energy-intensive facilities by building efficient data centers," said Larry Page, Google Co-founder and President of Products. "We want to apply the same creativity and innovation to the challenge of generating renewable electricity at globally significant scale, and produce it cheaper than from coal."
Brilliant. I'm pretty sure Brin and Page zipping around in their new private Boeing 757 and their legendary Boeing 767 "party jet" also makes them environmental heroes, although I haven't quite figured out how yet.
Although perhaps in a different class, another leading environmentally Janus-faced company is BP, whose corroding pipelines flooded Prudhoe Bay in Alaska with 200,000 gallons of crude oil in 2006. This year the company announced $500 million in funding for a clean-energy initiative.
Comments
nekote on 11/29/2007 at 4:20 PM
115
Somewhere between 1¢ and 6¢ per KWH would be a stunning change.
Since the 1970's oil shock, the cost of energy has been rising.
Reversing that trend would stand current expectations and markets on their head.
Putting the coal industry into bankruptcy?
Surely all but the very lowest cost producers of oil and natural gas, too?
They're also saying years, not decades.
kentgreen on 12/02/2007 at 2:42 AM
2
If you want to dis something about technology in your country try a rational review of the George Bush approach to technology development. (Perhaps reading Scientific American occasionally might be instructive for you)
Hurray for Google and anyone else who wants to step up to the plate.
javs on 12/08/2007 at 2:51 PM
52
The barrier is known as "native load," in which the enterprise revenue side of the utilities is protected from competition by the less valued (by the utility itself) natural monopoly grid side. Such protection is extended to central generation by long term contracts, working against distributed generation opportunities that Google will be promoting.
Electricity Without Price Controls (EWPC) is the solution to allow the development of the demand side of the power industry. EWPC is a market architecture and design paradigm shift of the power industry. The development of the demand side is mostly about information technologies, like Google strong know how.
For details about EWPC, go to www.energyblogs.com/ewpc