Google's Clean Energy Initiatives

Powering a Clean Energy Revolution @ Google

RE C

Business as usual will not deliver low-cost, clean, renewable energy soon enough to avoid devastating climate change. In fact, even producing large amounts of electricity from renewable sources won't make a difference unless we can find a way to make it cheaper than electricity from coal. That's why in 2007 Google.org launched RE C, an initiative aimed at creating utility-scale renewable electricity that is cheaper than coal.

RechargeIT
Google.org's RechargeIT initiative is aimed at accelerating the adoption of plug-in vehicles and "smart charging" applications. Transportation related greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for roughly one third of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States and at least 20% globally. We believe that plug-in hybrids capable of running on electricity are the best near term option for significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector.

Google PowerMeter
Google believes consumers have a right to access detailed information about their home electricity usage throughout the day - to help them save money and make smart energy decisions. Google is developing a prototype product called Google PowerMeter that allows people to see detailed home energy information in near real-time right on their computer.
Combined with their first device partner the TED 5000 - The Energy Detective device from Energy Inc. can help you understand your electricity usage to save energy and money.

Clean Energy 2030
The U.S. has a real opportunity to transform our economy from one running on fossil fuels to one largely based on clean energy. The energy team at Google has been crunching the numbers to see how we could greatly reduce fossil fuel use by 2030. Our analysis suggests a potential path to weaning the U.S. off of coal and oil for electricity generation by 2030 (with some remaining use of natural gas as well as nuclear), and cutting oil use for cars by 40%. Over 22 years this plan could generate billions of dollars in savings and help create millions of green jobs.

Solar Panels
In the summer of 2007, with an eye toward bringing solar power into the mainstream, Google switched on one of the largest corporate solar installations in the United States at our Mountain View headquarters. Their 9,212 solar panels produce 1.6 MW of electricity, which is enough to power approximately 1,000 average California homes. It reduces their carbon emissions and makes good business sense too; the installation will pay for itself in about 7.5 years.

(Fly Around) The World Without Fossil Fuels

Bertrand Piccard circumnavigated the Earth in a hot-air balloon. Now he wants to circle it in an airplane powered only by solar energy.

For the dawn of a new decade, adventurer Bertrand Piccard in this TED Talk offers us a challenge: Find motivation in what seems impossible. He shares his own plans to do what many say can't be done -- to fly around the world, day and night, in a solar-powered aircraft.



Bertrand Piccard was born in a family of firsts. His father, Jacques, together with Dan Walsh of the US, was the first man to reach the deepest point of the world's oceans, the Mariana Trench, in 1960. Almost 30 years earlier, his grandfather, Auguste, first ballooned into the stratosphere. While they went up and down, Bertrand went horizontal and in 1999, together with Brian Jones of Britain, completed the first-ever nonstop balloon circumnavigation of the globe, flying more than 45,000 km in 20 days.

Now, in a hangar near Zurich, a team of scientists and engineers around Piccard and co-pilot André Borschberg is building Solar Impulse, an unconventional aircraft designed to circumnavigate the Earth powered by solar energy, flying day and night (yes, when the Sun is "off"). The just-unveiled prototype has the weight of a car but the wingspan of an Airbus. Piccard hopes for test flights in the first half of 2010, and possibly a long flight in 2011, before attempting to fly around the Earth.

In a world depending on fossil energies, the Solar Impulse project is a paradox, almost a provocation: it aims to have an airplane take off and fly autonomously, day and night, propelled uniquely by solar energy, right round the world without fuel or pollution. An unachievable goal without pushing back the current technological limits in all fields...

WattzOn: Climate Change, Recalculated

On January 16, 2009, Saul Griffith of gave a talk at the Long Now Foundation . It was a long discussion that placed our personal lifestyles in the context of climate change and global energy production. A lot of people have requested the slides, here are the latest.



Saul examines his personal impact on climate change based on his energy use. He tells us how he changed his to low energy lifestyle from 17 kW in 2007 to less than 2300 Watts in 2010.

What's on?

WattzOn is a free online tool to quantify, track, compare and understand the total amount of energy needed to support all of the facets of your lifestyle with the goal of helping you find ways to reduce your personal power consumption.

It is becoming clear that our lifestyles have become unsustainable and that fossil fuel scarcity and global climate change are threatening to cause great economic and environmental damage to the world. Any solution to this problem will need to include a collective effort by all of us to reduce the amount of energy we are using in our lives.

With WattzOn's profile builder, you can easily get started in answering these questions. By examining a few key areas of energy use, the profile builder lets you know the baseline power (in watts) that your lifestyle currently requires. If you choose to sign up, you can then save this information, see how your impact compares to others', run visualizations showing the magnitude of your energy needs, and to join our community discussions. Through Wikipedia-like data editing, WattzOn is looking to people to enter data from their own experiences to help us all understand how we use energy in our lives.

Why watts?

A watt is a unit of power that indicates the rate at which you are using energy. For WattzOn, we normalize all of your profile answers (say, flights per year or miles driven per week) down to the second, so that you can see the average power that you are using in every moment of your life.

We chose watts because we want to change the conversation on personal accountability in climate change away from the common "carbon footprint" and towards collective energy reduction. Measuring in power rather than carbon emissions recognizes that it will not be possible to support our current lifestyles with any energy technology that we could implement in the near future - our needs are not sustainable. While there certainly needs to be a reduction of fossil fuel reliance by increasing alternative energy infrastructure, energy reduction will need to be part of any solution to this global challenge.

Learn more about the philosophy behind WattzOn (or check out this shorter version from the O'Reilly 2008 Web 2.0 Summit), and in this video presentation.

Book: Sustainable Energy - Without The Hot Air

David MacKay, the future government energy adviser and professor at Cambridge University's department of physics, warns us in his new book Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air that plans for energy production in the future will not come fast and will not come cheap.

We have an addiction to fossil fuels, and it’s not sustainable. The developed world gets 80% of its energy from fossil fuels; Britain, 90%. And this is unsustainable for three reasons. First, easily-accessible fossil fuels will at some point run out, so we’ll eventually have to get our energy from someplace else. Second, burning fossil fuels is having a measurable and very-probably dangerous effect on the climate. Avoiding dangerous climate change motivates an immediate change from our current use of fossil fuels. Third, even if we don’t care about climate change, a drastic reduction in Britain’s fossil fuel consumption would seem a wise move if we care about security of supply: continued rapid use of the oil and gas reserves will otherwise soon force fossil-addicted Britain to depend on imports from untrustworthy foreigners.

We need a plan that adds up. The good news is that such plans can be made. The bad news is that implementing them will not be easy.

Part I – Numbers, not adjectives

The first half of this book discusses whether a country like the United Kingdom, famously well endowed with wind, wave, and tidal resources, could live on its own renewables. We often hear that Britain’s renewables are “huge.” But it’s not sufficient to know that a source of energy is “huge.” We need to know how it compares with another “huge,” namely our huge consumption. To make such comparisons, we need numbers, not
adjectives.

Where numbers are used, their meaning is often obfuscated by enormousness. Numbers are chosen to impress, to score points in arguments, rather than to inform. In contrast, my aim here is to present honest, factual numbers in such a way that the numbers are comprehensible, comparable, and memorable. The numbers are made accessible by expressing them all in everyday personal units. Energies are expressed as quantities per person in kilowatt-hours (kWh), the same units that appear on household energy bills; and powers are expressed in kilowatt-hours per day(kWh/d), per person.

Part I of Sustainable Energy – without the hot air builds up an illustrative red consumption stack, enumerating the energy cost of a range of energy-consuming activities; and a complete green stack, adding up all the potential renewable resources available in Britain.

The first half gives two clear conclusions. First, for any renewable facility to make an appreciable contribution – a contribution at all comparable to our current consumption – it has to be country-sized.

Second, if economic constraints and public objections are set aside, it would be possible for the average European energy consumption of 125 kWh/d per person to be provided from these country-sized renewable sources. The two hugest contributors would be photovoltaic panels, which, covering 5% or 10% of the country, would provide 50 kWh/d per person; and offshore wind farms, which, filling a sea-area twice the size of Wales, would provide another 50 kWh/d per person on average.

Such an immense panelling of the countryside and filling of British seas with wind machines (having a capacity five times greater than all the wind turbines in the world today) may be possible according to the laws of physics, but would the public accept and pay for such extreme arrangements? If we answer no, we are forced to conclude that current consumption will never be met by British renewables. We require either a radical reduction in consumption, or signficant additional sources of energy – or, of course, both.

Part II – Energy plans that add up

The second part of Sustainable Energy – without the hot air explores six strategies for eliminating the gap between consumption and renewable production identified in the first part, then sketches several energy plans for Britain, each of which adds up.

The first three strategies for eliminating the gap reduce energy demand:

• population reduction;
• lifestyle change;
• changing to more efficient technology.

The other strategies for eliminating the gap increase energy supply:

• “Sustainable fossil fuels” and “clean coal” are names given to carrying on burning coal, but in a different way, with carbon capture and storage. What power could we get from coal, “sustainably”?
• Nuclear power is another controversial option; is it just a stop-gap?
• A third way to get extra carbon-free power would be to live on renewable energy from other countries – in particular, countries blessed with plentiful sunshine, large areas, and low population densities. What is the realistic potential of the Sahara desert?

Part III and Part IV

The third part of the book drills down to the physical foundations of energy consumption and energy production. Eight appendices show from first principles where the numbers in the first two parts come from.

The final sixteen pages of the book contain further reference data and conversion factors, useful for applying the book’s ideas to other countries, and for translating to and from units used by other organizations.

This is a free book. David MacKay didn't write this book to make money. He wrote it because sustainable energy is important. If you would like to have the book for free for your own use, please help yourself to any of the electronic versions on this website.