Google's green power play – 27 November 2007

In a move to shake up the nascent renewable energy industry, Google will spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing new solar and wind technologies while investing in green tech startups. The goal of Google is to send the fossil fuel industry to the coal bin of history by making renewable energy cheaper than coal, a main culprit in the global warming crisis. They want to deploy it as broadly as possible, which means they will license the technology or put it in place ourselves. Of particular interest is spreading renewable energy technology to rapidly industrializing but coal-dependent countries like China and India. Dubbed “Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal”, the Google initiative will involve hiring green energy engineers and technologists for an in-house R&D program that will focus on developing breakthroughs in large-scale solar power plants. At the same time, Google's philanthropic arm, Google.org, will invest in green energy companies. Within a few years Google wants to be able to produce a gigawatt of clean energy, which enough to power a city the size of San Francisco at a price that will undercut cheap electricity from coal-fired plants. Google already is working with two renewable energy startups. One is eSolar, a Pasadena, Calif., developer of utility-scale solar thermal power plants whose chairman is serial tech entrepreneur Bill Gross. The other is Makani Power, a stealth Bay Area startup that is developing what it calls "high-altitude wind energy extraction technologies aimed at the most powerful wind resources." Page and Brin declined to say if Google has invested in those companies.