Goggle RE initiative

Renewable Energy Access post on Google's RE initiative:
http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/news/story;jsessionid=8AA3AAA0D74352B373860E4200B5842B?id=50683

November 28, 2007

Google Mounts Renewable Energy Initiative

Mountain View, California [RenewableEnergyAccess.com]

Google has announced a new initiative to develop one gigawatt [THAT'S A LOT!] of electricity from renewable energy sources. The newly created initiative will focus primarily on advanced solar thermal power, wind power technologies, enhanced geothermal systems and other potential breakthrough technologies.

The initiative will be known as REGoogle will make investments in and provide grants to a variety of organizations in the renewable energy field, including companies, R&D laboratories and universities. eSolar Inc [SOLAR THERMAL POWER] and Makani Power Inc. [HIGH ALTITUDE WIND ENERGY] have already been named as two of Google's partners in the initiative.

"We have gained expertise in designing and building large-scale, energy-intensive facilities by building efficient data centers," said Larry Page, Google Co-founder and President of Products. "We want to apply the same creativity and innovation to the challenge of generating renewable electricity at globally significant scale, and produce it cheaper than from coal."

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Google website: http://www.google.com/corporate/green/energy/index.html
RE

• Hiring engineers and energy experts to do R&D
• Expects to spend "tens of millions" in 2008 on R&D and related investments + "hundreds of millions" in breakthrough RE technologies
• Says 1 GW can power San Francisco
• Company intends to be carbon neutral in 2007 - has 1.6MW corporate solar panel installation

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1-pager on eSolar, one of the two companies Google is working with
http://www.google.com/corporate/green/energy/esolar.pdf

• Solar thermal technology
• Developed modular power plant architecture to take advantage of mass manufactured components, in order to make capital cost of the solar field less than capital costs + fuel costs of traditional system
• Modular, scalable plant with generating capacities of 25MW to 500MW
• Minimizes installation time and cost
• Replications of components within modules and repetition of modules within plant provide energy security

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1-pager on Makhani Power, Inc., the other company Google is working with
http://www.google.com/corporate/green/energy/makani.pdf

• High altitude wind energy - avg wind energy 10 times greater than well-sited terrestrial turbine
• Dependable energy source
• Graph showing increase in power with increase in altitude (increasing returns to height 0-6km then decreasing 6-10km)

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NYT article: "Google’s Next Frontier: Renewable Energy," by Brad Stone, 28 Nov 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/technology/28google.html?hp

• "Mr. [Jordan] Rohan of RBC Capital Markets said that the returns were not obvious. “The only positive byproduct of this project that would be anything other than environmental,” he said, “is that it might make Google managers and executives even prouder of the fact that they work there, and it may help retain key employees who think their goal is to do good in the world. But I’m really stretching.”"
• Gist of article is that analysts think Google venturing too far afield from their business.
• But reminder that "In their Letter From the Founders before the company’s 2004 initial public stock offering, Mr. Page and Mr. Brin wrote: “Our goal is to develop services that significantly improve the lives of as many people as possible. In pursuing this goal, we may do things that we believe have a positive impact on the world, even if the near-term financial returns are not obvious.”"

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San Francisco Chronicle article, "Google to spend hundreds of millions on developing renewable energy," by Verne Kopytoff, 28 Nov 2007. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/28/MN8UTJR7P.DTL

• "Google also hopes to license any technology spawned from the effort to other companies so that they, too, can reduce their reliance on more polluting forms of energy while saving money. Co-founder Sergey Brin raised the possibility that the fees will be a new source of revenue for his company, but insisted that the goal isn't to rake in big profit."
• Other companies investing in clean energy include Walmart, Cisco Systems, Hewlett Packard
• Google's financial contribution relatively minor when measured against total investment in RE
• "Ron Pernick, co-founder of Clean Edge, an energy research company, said U.S. venture capital investment alone in clean energy was $2.4 billion, according to a joint study by Clean Edge and Nth Power, a venture capital firm."
• Not clear whether investment will fund anything new - Google announced few specifics
• Goal of making RE cost competitive with coal IS new commitment
• Coal costs 2-4 cents per kWh, depending on location. Google execs say RE will have to drop 1-3 cents per kWh to make it cost competitive.
• "If a large fraction goes to investing into companies that are being created anyway, then it's a big drop in a bucket," [James Sweeney, a Stanford professor and director of the university's Precourt Institute for Energy Efficiency] said. "But if it's funding basic research, which isn't getting enough funding, then it's probably a significant force in moving this forward."