Google Finds New Way to Give - Energy-Related Initiatives
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Of the five initiatives being undertaken by Google.org, only three are new; two were announced back in November 2007. The first of these is an attempt to develop renewable energy to the point that it is cheaper than coal. Dubbed RE<C for short, the specific goal is to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity for less than the cost of the same amount of energy if it were produced by burning coal. The one gigawatt goal is no coincidence; that's about what it takes to power San Francisco.
It's an ambitious goal, because coal is currently the cheapest source of electricity. Coal costs around four cents per kilowatt hour. By contrast, though the cost of solar energy has gone down over the past two decades, the Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that electricity from concentrated solar power plants costs about 10 to 14 cents per kilowatt hour. Google wants to see the price of renewable energy become competitive with coal on a time scale of years, not decades. In response to this problem, Google.org invested $10 million in eSolar. The California-based company creates solar thermal power systems that use reflected sunlight as a heat source to create steam which, in turn, drives electric generators.
The other new energy initiative in which Google is investing is named RechargeIT. It is focused on promoting the adoption of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and the spread of vehicle-to-grid technology. Here the giving seems to start at home. The company is working with A123 Systems and Hymotion to convert its fleet of hybrid cars into plug-in hybrids and to collect performance data to demonstrate their efficiency. Those cars will be connected to solar charging stations on the Google campus.
The company is also working with PG&E to demonstrate how electricity might be transmitted back and forth between plug-in hybrids and the grid. As with the hybrid conversion, this part of the initiative is still in the data collection stage.
Google.org is definitely investing money in this, however. It launched a $10 million request for investment proposals last fall, with plans to invest amounts ranging from $500,000 to $2 million. So far, the company has invested a total of $1 million with a number of grantees: the Brookings Institution, CalCars, the Electric Power Research Institute, Plug-in America, the Rocky Mountain Institute, and Dr. Willet Kempton at the University of Delaware. Activities of the grantees range from educational to political to research and development.
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