Google continues to invest in companies and research with the goal of producing renewable energy cheaper than coal, according to its "green energy czar." Google has touted its environmental consciousness, with CEO Eric Schmidt even pushing a national energy plan designed to cut the countrys greenhouse gas emissions nearly in half by 2030.Google is aiming to produce renewable energy cheaper than coal, both through its own
research and by investing in outside companies, with the goal of having such a
system operational within a few years.
"In, you know, three years, we could have multiple megawatts
of plants out there," Bill Weihl, green energy czar for Google, said in an
interview with
Reuters. "Well see whether we or us in combination with other
people are prepared to fund much, much bigger facilities, or if we want to get a
few more years experience before we really start to scale it
up."
Google has invested in advanced geothermal, wind and solar
thermal; the latter involves concentrating solar energy via mirrors in order to
power steam-turbines.
"We are looking at ways of cheaply getting to much higher
temperatures and also making the heliostats, the fields of mirrors that have to
track the sun, reflect the sun, keep it focused on the target we are trying to
heat up," Weihl told Reuters. "I think weve made some really interesting
progress in the last six to nine months."
Google has long attempted to position itself as a Green IT
leader.
In May 2009, Google
moved quickly to refute claims that its data centers and products were energy
inefficient, posting data on its blog that showed it would take 3.1 million
Google searches to equal the electricity consumed by the average U.S. household
in one month.
"Our engineers crunched the numbers and found that an average
query uses about 1 kJ of energy and emits about 0.2 grams of carbon dioxide,"
Urs Holzle, senior vice president of Operations at Google, wrote in a May 11
corporate blog posting.
It was the second time this year that Google reacted strongly
to claims that it contributes mightily to the nations overall carbon footprint;
the first came after a Harvard University physicist announced in January 2009
that two Google searches on a computer can generate nearly the same amount of
CO2 (carbon dioxide) as boiling a kettle.
In addition, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has pushed a national
energy plan that cuts greenhouse gas emissions nearly in half by 2030. During a
March 2009 environmental conference hosted by the Wall Street Journal, Schmidt
suggested that such a plan would save $4.4 trillion over that
period.
"Whats really first at Google is about changing the world,
in a positive way," Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal's Alan Murray at the
time. "Can we make a difference? In our case, were huge energy users, so a
relatively straightforward solution to our energy costs goes right to the bottom
line."