Google Investing in a Green Energy Future

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 has been 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 —until the Obama administration takes control, innovative corporations like Google are stepping up to the plate.

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 earlt this year 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.