Google "Search" for Cleaner Energy

[Karl]

Reuters, 1 October 2008 -

Google aims to do for the power grid what it did for the Web. Having conquered the market for Web search by first simplifying how it is done and then making sales of related advertising more efficient, Google Inc is now funding green technology and using its brand power to lobby for policy change. Google launched a plan on Wednesday to wean the United States off burning coal and oil for power by 2030, and cut oil use for cars by 40%. That will cost trillions of dollars, but Google believes it should ultimately save money.

Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said the annual cost of the energy plan would anyway be less than the $700 billion being considered to bail out the financial industry, and he saw some parallels between the energy challenge and the credit crisis. "That is an unconscionable failure of system design," he said. "It is inconceivable to me that the sum of the financial industry would have created that as a possible outcome." He said Google had not yet felt the economic impact of it, but added it was hard to say what would happen next.

"There is an equivalent scale problem in energy," he told reporters after a speech to San Francisco's Commonwealth Club entitled "Where Would Google Drill?". "I'm a computer scientist and computer scientists love scale problems. We like scale and replication and leverage in a technical way." Through its philanthropic arm Google.org, the company is backing start-ups designing wind, solar and geothermal technologies, which it hopes will eventually be cheaper than coal. Google invested $45 million in such companies this year. "But that is a drop when we need a flood," Google wrote on its official blog, Official Google Blog: Clean energy 2030

Read Full Article: World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD)