Google May Build Green-Tech Power Plants

By Alexis Madrigal December 2, 2009 | 10:42 am | Categories: Energy

SAN FRANCISCO — Google will become directly involved in deploying energy technologies, the company’s director of climate initiatives said Monday.

The company has long supported and invested in renewable energy but kept its participation to greening its campus and funding several solar, wind and geothermal companies. In September, Google announced it was internally developing a new mirror for solar thermal plants. Now, the company may wade even further into the energy sector.

“We’ll make a step soon into energy projects,” Dan Reicher, director of climate change and energy initiatives at Google, told a group of energy experts assembled in the cafeteria at the company’s swanky San Francisco office.

That could mean Google starts directly financing power plants. Throughout the energy innovation event, which also featured energy leaders from Stanford, MIT and UC Berkeley, Reicher stressed the importance of going beyond just research and development to deploying innovative energy technologies.

“Energy innovation to me means a real pipeline that goes from basic research to applied research to demonstration projects to the scale up and from there to full commercial deployment,” Reicher said. “It’s a long pipeline and to be honest we don’t do a very good job of moving technologies through this pipeline.”


Reicher said the Googlers have even coined a clever phrase to describe their vision of energy policy: “from light bulb to light bulb.” They want to help move new technologies from the idea (the first light bulb) to the product (the second light bulb).

He championed an idea bouncing around Congress to create a Clean Energy Deployment Administration, which would help green tech companies get large power plants built.

But with a ballooning federal deficit and rough economy, it’s hard to know where the money will come from. Reicher and the other panelists agreed that energy R&D funding should be around $15 billion a year.

MIT physicist Ernie Moniz warned several times that the current increase in energy research came courtesy of the stimulus bill, which won’t be around forever.

“We’re going to have to see what happens after these next two years because what we need is not a drop but a further increase in RD&D funding commensurate with the task at hand,” Moniz said.

One idea for raising funds is to shift it from other places within government through standard appropriations, but Moniz suggested a different kind of funding base. A small charge could be added to electricity usage, which would add up to a very large sum — the Office Space funding model.

Charging about four-tenths of a cent per kilowatt on the 3,669,919 million kilowatt hours of electricity used in the United States would yield the $15 billion dollars the energy researchers want. That would essentially be a 5 percent tax on the average cost of a kilowatt hour.

Moniz said the idea had worked before. A successful program taxed natural gas transmission across state lines to fund the non-profit Gas Research Institute, beginning in 1976.

Image: A mirror being placed at Brightsource’s Israeli demonstration facility. Google has invested in Brightsource and other solar thermal players like eSolar.

See Also:

•Google Smart Meter App Not Ready for Finals
•Google’s Super Satellite Captures First Image
•Google.Org Doubles Down on Solar Thermal Power
•Biggest Solar Deal Ever Announced — We’re Talking Gigawatts
•Utilities Jumping into the Solar Game
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Google Reader feed, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

Close Posted by: 3N1GMA | 12/2/09 | 1:54 pm |
Solar thermal is the way to go. Props to Google. Now if they’d only release free-energy magnetic motors…

Posted by: driverguy7 | 12/2/09 | 2:02 pm |
They’ll probably make radioactive plankton batteries that never run out of power….

Posted by: Arkyll | 12/2/09 | 2:24 pm |
I HEART GOOGLE

Posted by: onlyhuman | 12/2/09 | 2:42 pm |
being green is good

but

wanting consumers to pay a little extra or add a tax for research is nothing but corporate socialism

Posted by: h311c477 | 12/2/09 | 2:44 pm |
3N1GMA:

No such thing as free energy bud. 1st law, 2nd law cannot be broken. There have been many attempts and zero successes. And please don’t go off about some gov’t conspiracy.

Posted by: svanneck | 12/2/09 | 3:47 pm |
With all those mirrors going online, I’m buying stock in Windex.

Posted by: Gifftor | 12/2/09 | 3:58 pm |
@onlyhuman
Corporate socialism?
-
That’s the mating call of oxymorons.
-

Posted by: sethdayal | 12/2/09 | 3:58 pm |
Not so “renewable” costs are at minimum ten times the cost of mass produced nuclear power.

Germany has already wasted 10 years and $100 billion on solar/wind and has not reduced its greenhouse emissions one iota. To help with its new found addiction to Russian gas, it is planning a massive build of dirty coal plants to meet its baseload power requirements.

Nuclear power is the only possible answer to a maybe ten years away civilization ending peak oil/climate crisis.

A worldwide build of 10000 reactors would be paid for by and would end fossil fuel use using only a small fraction of our industrial capacity with investments returns in a three year payback period. With mass production, nuclear power costs drop from the current Asian $1.5 to under $1 billion a gigawatt cheaper than coal and 10% the least cost not so “renewable”.

Tthe US needs 2500 new reactors but is crippled by inefficient private power companies, a biased Nuclear Rejection Commission and corrupt and litigious political and legal systems, quadrupling nuclear costs and time frames. Rather than wasting money on not so “renewables” the US should be fixing the issues that make a US designed AP-1000 reactor cost 4 times as much and take twice as long to build as the same reactor in China. Labour is a small percentage of nuclear construction costs.

A nuclear conversion saves us a ton of money, eliminates air pollution and the associated death and suffering of thousands of Canadians, arrests our slide over the climate/peak oil precipice, creates a huge employment boosting domestic and export industry, and makes our economy far more competitive than Europe’s run with converts to the not so “renewable” religion. Even the deniers here would go for it.

Goggle steven kirsch for lessons in how to git ‘er done.

Posted by: joelapp | 12/2/09 | 4:24 pm |
Google is completely STUPID. If I were a stockholder, I would be screaming “DO YOUR JOB!” You’re not a stinkin’ power company, you’re an IT company. Quickest way to kill a company: get off mission.

Posted by: TikoBroje | 12/2/09 | 4:57 pm |
If Google was really interested in providing society with a “greater good” they would provide financial assistance to outfit individual buildings (both commercial and residential) with solar panels or wind turbines. Solar ‘plants’ are still centralized power which people have to pay into and requires reliance on the inefficient power grid.

Posted by: damasterwc | 12/2/09 | 5:16 pm |
i agree with sethdayal…
if google is interested in energy, it should develop lead cooled reactors or help revive the LFTR or other thorium reactors, etc. advanced design nuke reactors are the solution. it’s just so crappy that media led fear mongering allowed the government to cut off research in the 70s… plus clinton caved in as well and shut down the fast breeder in the 90s. all of this would have been solved by now… btw, for those of you who don’t know about these types of reactors and might be concerned about “nuclear waste” (which is in reality 97% fuel), these advanced reactor designs “burn” about 99% of the fuel greatly reducing the waste. in fact, the LFTR (liquid floride thorium reactor) is mineable after 300 years, and would be loaded full of precious metals like platinum.

Posted by: mccuerc | 12/2/09 | 5:16 pm |
@human you are incorrect. A tax to fund a public good like open research is not corporate socialism. While badly defined corporate socialism seems to be a way to keep failing businesses open so as to avoid unemployment or as a way of paying off the contributors to a political campaign. By definition corporate socialism is restricted in disbursement to coproprate entities who employ legal means to avoid redistributing any benefit from the input. A public research institution must publish information to all. Similar to the theory behind the patent system it is a way of creating and distriubuting new technology. The patent system grants a private monopoly and right of exploitation for a number of years: the protected private profit is a “tax” as it is coercively enforced by the government on the initial users. The pay off is that the knowledge is disseminated. Research institutes are similar to universities in that the dissemination of the knowledge is the end product. Neither is provably superior to the other in terms of distributing knowledge. They actually seem to work together much better than they work separately. Research institutes and universities tend to work on the basics, areas usually with a low pay off, and then individuals cut corners and costs to get a commercial process, something with an immediate pay off if you can keep the monopoly.

Posted by: treq | 12/2/09 | 6:52 pm |
@ sethdayal: “Germany has already wasted 10 years and $100 billion on solar/wind and has not reduced its greenhouse emissions one iota.”
[citation needed]

Also, I note that you completely forget to discuss the fact that the raw materials used in manufacturing fuel for nuclear plants are 1) finite. 2) mined. 3) linked with unstable political climates as much as oil 4) has no proven, safe disposal method other than building a giant concrete garbage pit to dump it in and forget about (i.e. leave it to our grandchildren to worry about). Nuclear does have advantages, but also just as many disadvantages, as does every other source of energy. I’d rather have a bunch of solar panels in my back yard than a power plant or nuclear waste disposal facility – and if you think that stashing them in the middle of nowhere solves the problem, it just means that you need to get out of the city more often and face the open spaces that you’ll be irretrievably ruining and making unusable for future generations. Remember, landspace is finite, but radioactivity is as good as infinite to the average species.

@ joelapp:

It’s called strategy. It’s called energy independence. The easiest way that Google can increase their profits is to lower operating costs. They invest an insane amount of R&D in high efficiency cooling and low power data centers. Getting them off the grid and as autonomous as possible is an ideal long term strategy when facing nothing but increasing energy costs.

Posted by: mystixa | 12/2/09 | 8:15 pm |
They may not currently be a power producing company in general, but they are a massive power user. They own the largest data centers in the world. Those and others like them currently use 1% of the worlds total power output. They are essentially in the business of turning electrical power into information.

This is such a central calculation for them that it even dictates their choice of processor. They choose processors not based on clock speed, but calculations per watt. If they were able to generate their own low cost power it would go a long ways towads increasing their overall profits. ..any side benefits for CO2 emissions is just gravy.

Posted by: benc | 12/2/09 | 8:26 pm |
Geothermal is the best way to go. Why? Well when the sun doesnt shine, geothermal still works. Many people also think you need to be near hot springs to harness geothermal,….you dont. You can drill into the earth nearly anywhere and harness the heat that the well will produce. Just drill deep enough and you will find plenty of heat. Solar is only good for boosting power during the day.

Posted by: sethdayal | 12/3/09 | 12:14 am |
Treq might try googling the following for Germany’s green energy results germanys-green-energy-gap and my steven kirsch reference would update him on what will be done about nuclear waste/fuel issues.

Damastrewc’s comment should also help. For some reason Treq chose not to read it before commenting.

Posted by: sethdayal | 12/3/09 | 12:19 am |
Mass large scale gigawatt level geothermal energy requires drilling deep into the earth injecting water and pumping with not yet invented 400 deg C pumps supercritical steam to the surface driving generators but also causing earthquakes.

Aside from the low hanging fruit already plucked and geothermal enhanced home heat pumps (powered with nuclear power) geothermal at this point is an extremely expensive pipe dream.

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