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.

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).

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.

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.

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