To end a year that watched Google install the largest corporate solar installation in the United States, give $1 million in grants (and commit $10 million more) to accelerate the development of plug-in hybrid technology, and commit to climate neutrality for global operations from 2007 on, Google has launched its biggest and most ambitious plan yet: a strategic initiative to make renewable energy cheaper than coal.
The RE<C initiative’s goal is to produce 1 GW (enough electricity to power San Francisco!) of renewable energy at lower cost than electricity from coal. This project will bring Google’s corporate and philanthropic arms together, while also partnering with other companies, R&D laboratories, universities, and a Google research team of energy engineers, analysts, entrepreneurs, and economists. The initial focus will be making breakthroughs in solar thermal, geothermal, and wind technology to increase efficiency and lower cost. In 2008, they plan to invest tens of millions of dollars in RE<C, with even greater investment (and even greater returns) in the future.
Larry Page, Google Co-founder and President of Products, explained why Google’s becoming a green energy R&D company, saying, “We have gained expertise in designing and building large-scale, energy-intensive facilities by building efficient data centers. 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.” Google has set the standard for corporate greening (read on for more examples), and the RE<C initiative could spur incredible future investment and RE development.
Page added that RE<C would be building off of existing work on renewables and helping mature industries on the brink of cost-competitiveness. “We are aware of several promising technologies, and believe there are many more out there. With talented technologists, great partners and significant investments, we hope to rapidly push forward. Our goal is to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that is cheaper than coal.”
Page ended by saying, “We are optimistic this can be done in years, not decades.”
While the research team moves forward on new technologies, Google.org will be working with existing companies. Already, they’re working with eSolar Inc. - a company generating electricity from solar thermal technology - and Makani Power Inc. - developing high altitude wind capture systems.
Dr. Larry Brilliant, Executive Director of Google.org, said, “Google.org’s hope is that by funding research on promising technologies, investing in promising new companies, and doing a lot of R&D ourselves, we may help spark a green electricity revolution that will deliver breakthrough technologies priced lower than coal.”
Google also hopes to spur renewable energy and energy efficiency by large scale purchases and innovation on its own campuses worldwide, as a part of its corporate program for cliamte neutrality and environmental performance.
By 2012, Google’s goal is to power its operations with 50 MW of renewable energy (through solar thermal, photovoltaics, wind, and fuel cells). First steps towards this include the 1.6 MW solar installation on the Mountain View, CA campus and the solar water heating installation in Hyderabad, India campus to meet all hot water needs.
To address the impact of employee’s transportation, Google has a number of transportation initiatives in offices worldwide. In Europe, the Middle East and Asia, Google offered 2,000 employees free bikes and helmets to ride to work. In the Californian office, green transportation options are even wider. They include free biodiesel shuttle buses from San Francisco to Mountain View used by more than 1,200 employees, car shares for daytime use (driving to business meetings, for example) for employees who bike or take public transit to work, and $5,000 rebates to employees who buy hybrids or other cars with more than 45 mpg averages. Meanwhile, the RechargeIT program through Google.org is investing heavily in plug-in hybrid and Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) research, including monitoring the performance of their plug-in fleet.
Google has also been making its servers and computing systems more efficient, with innovative methods of cooling data centers. In order to help other companies and individuals make computers and computer use more energy-efficient, Google helped form the Climate Savers Computing Initiative.
And to actually harness Google’s existing powers for more greenness, initiatives like adding a public transit feature to GoogleMaps directions, helping users make sea level rise maps, and using digital imaging to help with the UNEP’s Atlas of Our Changing Environment.
In order to meet their climate neutrality goal, they’re purchasing carbon credits, with independent verification and proven additionality. So far, they’ve funded programs in Brazil and Mexico to install anaerobic digesters in livestock operations to capture methane and nitrous oxide (and improve local water conditions).
Yet despite the awesomeness of their corporate initiatives, they still pale in comparison to the scope of the RE<C campaign. Google has taken a big dream — to make electricity from renewable energy cheaper than electricity from coal — added millions of dollars and amazing engineers, and can actually make this a reality.
Both Larry Page and Larry Brilliant were right — we do need this to happen in years not decades; we do need a green electricity revolution. We just don’t have decades to wait for solutions — we don’t even have the years to wait for widespread adoption of Google’s silver bullet cheaper-than-coal technologies.
But it’s a great step forward, one that our government should have taken years ago rather than Google taking today. But now that Google has made a commitment to this technical research, can the government make policies in Bali to complement this technology? Can we commit to changing the efficiency of our buildings, our cars, our lives? And can other companies join Google — in green corporate policy and in innovative investments in breakthrough technologies? We’ll need it all…
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The issues are deceptive. Under the right circumstances a paddle wheel water mill is cheaper than coal. Certainly our ancestors lived “cheaper than coal” centuries ago. The issues need to be reframed into what do you have to live without, deprived of, by being coal dependent, and is the cost of the alternative within your budget of “cost of living”?
See what I mean by an exploration on a new blog:
http://100-mpg-car.blogspot.com/2007/11/introducing-commentary-on-re.html
http://100-mpg-car.blogspot.com/2007/11/continuing-previous-post-renewable.html
While I entirely agree that with more thorough analysis than just economics (including the social, health and environmental costs of coal as well as other fossil fuels) many kinds of renewables are already FAR less expensive than coal. And certainly, for remote villages or small island nations, renewables are not only less expensive but more healthy and safe. I’ve been able to visit a number of projects in the Philippines and in India where the government and communities both recognize that extending the grid or paying for the import of kerosene is far more expensive than solar systems or, as you mention, small hydro systems. Solar lanterns or solar battery charging stations can produce higher quality light and better indoor air quality for homes and communities.
Additionally, the health costs of coal (and all fossil fuels) are enormous, not to mention the costs that climate change will place on all of us. If a carbon tax or mandatory carbon cap-and-trade were put in place in the US or around the world, coal’s real costs would become more apparent to all decision-makers and stakeholders (consumers, investors, politicians…) and many kinds of RE would also already be cheaper than coal.
One of the researchers here at TERI said yesterday that all of these economic tools and incentives (carbon tax, cap and trade, carbon credits, CDM, etc.) are temporary tools to help the market grow. They help reflect the real cost of carbon-intensive development. Once the market for RE and the RE technologies themselves are really mature, their lower cost will be enough to sway the entire market.
But, in the US, as sad as it is that we don’t incorporate environmental, social, and health costs into energy decisions today, investors in power plants, our governments, and many consumers are going to be considering the straight economic analysis. Since a carbon tax doesn’t seem to be in the short- to medium-term political future, I think we still do need to find RE sources that are less expensive than coal - in simple dollars and cents - and for this reason, programs like Google’s are crucial.
I appreciate your point of view, but you missed mine entirely, which I made more clearly on the links provided. The point I make is it is not so important what the price of coal is or what the price of renewable energy is — it’s more important to understand what you get, AND what you forgo, when you make one of several mutually exclusive choices.
To illustrate my point I provided two links, rather than verbosely retell the points.
What you DON’T GET when you buy into the coal power paradigm is you DON’T GET a distributed grid with multiple redundant buffering against disruptions. You DON’T GET a 200,000,000 million node distributed computer system of unparalleled power. You DON’T GET the mass volume effect on inverter prices and development progress. You DON’T GET the security of local transportation fuels versus long logistical supply lines which need constant defending. You DON’T GET freedom from political corruption that centralized extremes of wealth has always spawned all through history. None of these points are even on your radar screen according to your comments above.
That suggests that you don’t comprehensively grasp the synergy of certain clusters of tech elements which does not exist at all in their individuality. Synergy, by definition, is emergent properties which cannot be predicted by the simple sums of the properties of the constituent parts.
If you cannot grasp synergy, you certainly cannot do a proper financial accounting of it, and neither can google.org. That’s the point I made on the links provided.
There are 300MM Americans with 105MM homes and 200MM cars & light trucks. That’s 200MM fuel cells and 200MM computers just in the transportation fleet, and those computers will all be web-cell-wifi connected 24/7 because a V2G car requires at least that much. With 300MM inverters required for Solar PV, V2G.
You haven’t even begun to realize what you DON’T GET when you turn your back on all that to pick cheap coal. For Amish wood is cheaper than coal, but look what they have to turn their back on to get their cheap bargain. Your bargain is no better.
The scenario above works IF you can convert enough vehicles to electric. I am not sure a hydrogen fuel cell will win the day as hydrogen is a weak energy carrier (even liquid hydrogen is one third the energy per unit volume of gasolene). Cellulosic ethanol is about half the energy per unit volume, but that won’t help the electric storage issue.
My guess is that a really cheap superconductor might be the answer…If it can be developed. In the meantime, we will likely need some of the polictically incorrect technologies (e.g., carbon sequestration, etc).
In an unrelated stream related to this post, I’ve received a few comments more focused on the Google energy-side and energy related to internet use.
It’s definitely true that Google uses a huge amount of energy, of which their 16 MW solar system is a really small percent. A lot of their power is coming from dirty coal and other fossil fuels in the grid, and even at the current prices of coal, Google’s business side can already see that it’s costly (not to mention environmentally damaging). So their investments in clean energy and efficiency are definitely not just PR or corporate social responsibility. Moving servers to cooler areas and creating alternative systems to power and cool these server farms saves huge amounts of money. But they still need to look for more alternatives (as do all other computer/internet companies and I’ll post more on that tomorrow).
I really liked the post “Analysts Don’t Get Yesterdays Google Coal-Free Announcements”
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/google/analysts-dont-get-yesterdays-google-coal+free-announcements-327359.php
which is primarily responding to the NY Times article
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/technology/28google.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
which quotes a number of financial analysts questioning why Google would make enormous investments in renewable energy and wondering if Google can continue to expand in so many sectors so unrelated to its primary purpose of enabling internet search engines.
But Adam Frucci at gizmodo is right, Google’s research to bring price of RE down will benefit Google immensely in three major ways — direct financial returns when their RE technologies get used by thousands of other consumers, direct financial returns when they can power their own operations (highly energy-intensive server farms around the world), and indirect financial returns from all of the positive PR from being an environmentally conscious firm.
And a lot of other firms (especially related to computers and the internet) are seeing that same light. While I focused a lot on Google’s programs, Hewlett-Packard also reported this week that it will “install a one mega-watt solar electric power system at its manufacturing plant in San Diego, and buy 80 gigawatt-hours of wind energy in Ireland next year. H.P. said that together, the agreements would save it around $800,000 in energy costs.” (from the NY Times article above)
There are a lot of very different reports on the quantity of energy used by the internet — all of the servers, computers, computer manufacturers, etc. — and I’ll get back soon to IGHIH to open that can of electronic worms.