Google to spend millions on green energy project

By Teresa Garcia
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. Nov. 27, 2007 (KGO) - Google is making hundreds of millions - now it wants to spend some of those millions to research green energy. Part of the idea is to offset the power demands of the company's massive computing centers.
Google has been a leader in the online search world and while its newest venture into renewable energy resources may be foreign territory. The company certainly has the financial clout behind it to make it happen.
Google's new initiative is called "Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal." In 2008, it plans to invest tens of millions of dollars on research and development and related renewable energy technologies. The money will come from its philanthropic arm -- Google.org. The initiative's focus is to get alternative energy sources, like solar, wind and geothermal powers, to eventually surpass, or replace electricity produced from coal. Right now coal supplies 40-percent of the world's electricity.
Google says it decided to branch into the energy business not only to provide renewable energy for its own power needs, but for the world.
"It's an even greater social benefit if we can simultaneously help create a technology pathway that allows everyone in the developed and developing worlds to have power that does not contribute to climate change," said Dr. Larry Brilliant, Executive Dir., Google.org.
"Our goal is to really produce a gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that's cheaper than coal economically, and we're optimistic that this can be done in years, not decades, that are usually quoted. A gigawatt can power San Francisco for example. So we feel like if we can do it at that scale, we can do at a scale that would be very significant for the world," said Larry Page, Co-Founder and Pres. of Products - Google Inc..
Google is already known for making its own core business environmentally sustainable -- it generates electricity for its Mountain View campus with one of the largest solar panel installations in the U.S.. Plus it's designed more energy-efficient servers and data centers.
Right now, it costs more money to produce electricity from solar power than coal. But the goal of Google's investments is to eventually make it cheaper. Such a success will make this quite a profitable venture.