Google Inc. has announced that is will invest hundreds of millions of dollars to produce renewable energy “cheaper than coal”. The company has set a goal of 1GW of power generation capability within “years, not decades”. The new initiative, called RE<C, will focus on solar thermal, wind power, geothermal power and other potential technologies.
“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.”
Page continued, “With talented technologists, great partners and significant investments, we hope to rapidly push forward. Our goal is to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that is cheaper than coal. We are optimistic this can be done in years, not decades.” (One gigawatt can power a city the size of San Francisco.)
“If we meet this goal,” said Page, “and large-scale renewable deployments are cheaper than coal, the world will have the option to meet a substantial portion of electricity needs from renewable sources and significantly reduce carbon emissions. We expect this would be a good business for us as well.”
Google will be investing directly in renewable energy companies and also providing grants through its charitable foundation, google.org. Google has committed to be carbon neutral for 2007, and with this initiative they are taking a bigger step to help reduce carbon use significantly.
I think the combination of Google’s foresight and innovation combined with the desire to get renewable energy prices less than the dominant source, coal, means greater innovation to come and probably lots of profit for Google. Good for them!
Picture: Solar panels at Google’s Mountain View, CA HQ.
