[Graeme]

Changing the World One Kilowatt at a Time

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '�')��To deal with climate change, you really have to tackle the big problems, which are in electricity generation … and transportation fuels,” Brin said at the Nov. 27, 2007, initiative rollout press conference. Google is starting with electricity. “[We] need to have clean technologies that are ready to start to scale up” and that will cost less than coal within 10 years, Weihl says. Although there are lots of great technologies out there, and lots of companies are doing “exciting” things, he says, “many people are really worried that we’re not doing enough, we’re not going to get there fast enough” to mitigate the effects of climate change. Google wants to find renewable energy that can be cheaper than coal in as few as five or six years, he says. “It might be a little less, might be a little more; [but] we don’t want the target and the likely outcome to be 10 or 15 or 20 years.”

One key point is that these technologies need to be “scalable” — meaning they need to be able to be usable by a large number of consumers quickly. After talking to a lot of researchers, venture capitalists, government labs and academics, Google settled on three technologies — solar thermal, high-altitude wind and enhanced geothermal powers — that it thinks can be scaled up quickly, and that have the potential to produce a gigawatt of electricity in just a few years (one gigawatt could power a city the size of San Francisco). The corporation is now hiring new people, investing tens of millions of dollars in internal research and development and investing in a couple of companies that are already working on these technologies to help them develop more quickly.