Google Prepared to Spend More on Green Energy than U.S. Gov't

Since the government won’t do it, Google Inc is prepared to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in big commercial alternative-energy projects to end the nation’s reliance on dirty energy like coal and oil. While the Bush Administration has made some token statements and gesture to support green energy, real change is far from their main agenda. With a grossly disproportional amount of our national budget invested in warfare, it seems there’s no money left over for creating a livable future. In reality, the Feds are in happily in bed with big oil and the torrid love affair looks set to continue—that is, until innovative corporations like Google step up to the plate.

According to Reuters, the Internet giant says it will invest in researching green technologies and renewable-energy companies, and is eager to help promising technologies amass scale to help drive the cost of alternative energy below the cost of coal.

"There are a lot of technologies that get to the pilot scale and look promising, but the first few large commercial projects deploying those technologies, financing those can be extremely difficult," Dan Reicher said in an interview at the Clean-tech Investor Summit in Indian Wells, California.

"Often the usual equity and debt players will say come back to us when you've demonstrated this at scale," said Reicher, director of climate and energy initiatives for Google's philanthropic arm, Google.org.

The stage between successfully developing a new technology and amassing scale is referred in the industry as the "Valley of Death," Reicher said. Venture capital firms will traditionally pour tens of millions into developing new technologies, Reicher said. But even then it’s not nearly enough to build a utility-scale solar thermal plant, for instance, and that's where Google thinks it can be helpful. They’ll step up to get the little guys off the ground.

"When you get to building a commercial-scale project in the energy world, you can be looking easily at hundreds of millions or even across the billion dollar threshold," Reicher said. "Over years we'll be looking at hundreds of millions of dollars. So we're very mindful of the Valley of Death."

In addition to considering project finance, Google has already committed $20 million to funding start-up firms researching solar-thermal and high-altitude wind power. It is also looking closely at several companies with enhanced geothermal systems, Reicher said. Enhanced geothermal systems, or EGS, create power by pumping water into hot rocks in the ground rather than harvesting hot water already there.

"We arrived at these three technologies because we think they have real promise to move down the cost curve and to be competitive with coal and to get to very large scale," Reicher said.

Google announced in November it planned to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to help drive the cost of electricity made from renewable sources below the price of power generated from dirty coal-fired plants.
The company has also pledged $10 million to Pasadena, California-based eSolar Inc to support research and development on solar thermal power, which concentrates heat from the sun to create steam and spin turbines. Another $10 million has been invested in Alameda, California-based Makani Power Inc, which is developing high-altitude wind technologies.

Google Power....Wow!

Posted by Rebecca Sato.

 

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Source:
http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSN0632795720080207?sp=true

Comments

[Al Fin]

Good for Google. That is the purpose of private commerce at this stage in the technology.

Government can continue funding basic research.

[MICHAEL J. SCHMITZ]

ON FEB.02/2008 I SOLVED THE GLOBAL WARMING PROBLEM, ALL I NEED IS FULL PERMISSION OF 12 COUNTRIES TO USE A PART OF. ALSO ALOT OF MONEY, SO I'M GOING TO PUT MY FAST FLOOD RELIEF PLAN UP FOR AUCTION. A AUCTION FOR EACH COUNTRY SO EACH COUNTRY WILL HAVE A CHANCE TO STOP THE FLOODING. RESULTS=DELETE FLOODS FAST/SAFE PERMANENTLY PROVEN BY EMERGENCY WATER PLANNING DEPARTMENTS IN CERTAIN CITIES AND WHERE PROVEN, IMMEDIATELY IMPLEMENTED. STARTING BID PER COUNTRY $100,OOO AMERICAN DOLLARES IN THE NEXT 3 WEEKS ON www.amazon.com IT WILL TAKES ME APPROXIMATELY FROM START OF GLOBAL PROJECT 5-1/2 YEARS. EXHAUST AND GASES DECIPATE AT 1000 FEET. WHATS A URL? ALSO NASA IS HAVING THE HUBBLE TELESCOPE TRACK AN INCOMING OBJECT. THIS OBJECT IS ON A COLLISION COURSE WITH HALLET'S COMET. NO DANGER TO EARTH.

[MICHAEL J.SCHMITZ]

IN JULY 2007 I INVENTED THE TSUNAMI PROTECTOR www.inventube.com/blog/view/59/thetsunamiprotector AFTER INVENTING IT MY DEMONISTRATION WAS A PART OF THE GLOBAL WARMING PROBLEM ONLY AT THAT TIME I DID'NT KNOW IT, BUT IN THE LAST 3 MONTHS, I STUMBLEDUPON ALOT OF WEB SITES TO GATHER VITAL INFORMATION AND THE LAST AWAKEN 78 HOURS I FORCED THE ANSWER AND WHEN I TOLD PEOPLE AND FOUND IT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE TO WORKOUT WITH TODAY'S PEOPLE. I WENT BACK TO WORK TO TRY AND FIND ANOTHER WAY, THIS IS WHEN I DIOBOLICKLY FOUND A WAY TO BUILD WITH FUNDS I COULD ACQUIRE. OUR UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT FOUND MY PLAN WAS ON THE NOSE AND CONFISCATED CERTAIN FILES THROUGH MY COMPUTER COMPANY AND MY SATELLIGHT COMPANY AND ARE STILL MONITORING MY COMPUTER TO NO AVAIL. ONLY INFORMATION WAS IN THERE, NOT MY EXPERIMENTS OR PLANS. WHY OUR OWN GOVT. IS AGAINST GLOBAL WARMING FIXING IS BEYOND ME. OH WELL I'LL KEEP ON TRYING.

[Mitch the Bitch]

Lets see, without National Security and it's cousin Warfare we wouldnt be here in which case "Green Energy" wouldnt much matter now would it?

Freakin flower children Morons EVERYWHERE....

[B.B.]

are you kidding me Mitch? You must be retarded if you think spending 8 times more on warfare than on education is why we're "still here". Explain to me how the many nations that haven't been involved in warfare for centuries have managed to still be here and lo and behold--most of them have longer life expectancies and higher quality of life than the US.

War only begets more war. If you weren't retarded you'd know that, but I won't hold that against you.

[Mirror Man]

AMEN brother! though i agree that it is certainly important for the US to keep up a decent military program, the level of spending as of late has been so astronomically obscene that i wonder why the revolt hasn't begun yet.

if we spent the money on solving the energy problem then we wouldn't need the oil and then we wouldn't need to be such assholes to the middle-eastern people.

i think your average Citizen these days know that we sure as hell are not over there to "fight terrorism."

terrorism is just an excuse to spend fantastic amounts of money on war and erode our civil rights.
oops, did i say that out loud?
never you mind, go back to sleep.

[Bosco]

"While the Bush Administration has made some token statements and gesture to support green energy, real change is far from their main agenda. With a grossly disproportional amount of our national budget invested in warfare, it seems there’s no money left over for creating a livable future. In reality, the Feds are in happily in bed with big oil and the torrid love affair looks set to continue—"

Why not take a 5lb mallet and beat us about the head and shoulders with your leftwing propaganda? This site is mostly garbage with it's blatent leftward politics.

If Bush is so evil wtf was CLINTON doing for 8 friggin years? Why didn't HE wean us from oil, pave the US with solar cells? If the US is so bad then why is it some of the worlds largest companies are socialist oil companies OWNED in whole or part by their social governments, French, Dutch, Chinese, etc. This is hardly a complete list of questions that could be derived from your propaganda statement and the assumptions underlying it. You'd ask them if you were either honest or not ideologically blinded.

[Get a Clue]

Bosco, you're the one that sounds "ideologically blinded" if you think the current administration has done a good job of protecting the environment. This article wasn't a history lesson about Clinton or what any particular president did or didn't do well. It is about the present situation, which is that our current administration is vastly overspending on war while being obliviously unwilling to sustain the environment that allows us to survive. Can you really try and argue that?

[mooey]

Bosco, we're so sorry you feel like you were hit over the head. We had no idea those in the right had such sensitive ears. If your wish is to only hear points of view you agree with, there are many places on the internet you can do this. Although they may occasionally stray to messages you might not agree with entirely, so perhaps your sensitivities are not well developed enough for use of the internet.