Green Blog
A better web. Better for the environment.
Eric Schmidt discusses Clean Energy 2030
10/3/08
Watch Google's Chairman and CEO discuss our
recent proposal
for reducing U.S. dependence on fossil fuels:
You can read the full plan
here
.
Posted by Katy Bacon, Google.org Team
Clean Energy 2030
10/1/08
(Cross-posted from the
Official Google Blog
)
Right now the U.S. has a very real opportunity to transform our economy from one running on fossil fuels to one largely based on clean energy. We are developing the technologies and know-how to accomplish this. We can build whole new industries and create millions of new jobs. We can reduce energy costs, both at the gas pump and at home. We can improve our national security. And we can put a big dent in climate change. With strong leadership we could be moving forward on an aggressive but realistic timeline and an approach that balances costs with real economic gains.
The energy team at Google has been crunching the numbers to see how we could greatly reduce fossil fuel use by 2030.
Our analysis
, led by Jeffery Greenblatt, 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%. Al Gore has
issued a challenge
that is even more ambitious, getting us to carbon-free electricity even sooner. We hope the American public pushes our leaders to embrace it. T. Boone Pickens has weighed in with an interesting
plan
of his own to massively deploy wind energy, among other things. Other plans have also been developed in recent years that merit attention.
Our goal in presenting this first iteration of the
Clean Energy 2030 proposal
is to stimulate debate and we invite you to take a look and comment - or offer an alternative approach if you disagree. With a new Administration and Congress - and multiple energy-related imperatives - this is an opportune, perhaps unprecedented, moment to move from plan to action.
Over 22 years this plan could generate billions of dollars in savings and help create millions of green jobs. Many of these high quality, good-paying jobs will be in today's coal and oil producing states.
To get there we need immediate action on three fronts:
(1) Reduce demand by doing more with less
We should start with the low-hanging fruit by reducing energy demand through energy efficiency -- adopting technologies and practices that allow us to do more with less. At Google, we've seen the benefits of this approach. We identified $5M in building efficiency investments with a 2.5 year payback. We've also
designed our own data centers to run more efficiently
, and we believe they are the most efficient in the world. On a smaller scale, personal computers can also become much more efficient. A typical desktop PC wastes nearly half the power it consumes. Last year, Bill Weihl, our Green Energy Czar, worked with industry partners to create the
Climate Savers Computing Initiative
to raise energy efficiency standards for personal computers and servers. If we meet our goals, these standards will cut energy consumption by the equivalent of 10-20 coal-fired power plants by 2010.
Government can have a big impact on achieving greater efficiency. California's aggressive building codes, efficiency standards and utility programs have helped the state keep per-capita energy use flat for years, while consumption in much of the rest of the country has grown significantly. Enacting similar policies at the national level would help even more.
We also need to give the American people opportunities to be more efficient. The way we buy electricity today is like going to a store without seeing prices: we pick what we want, and receive an unintelligible bill at the end of the month. When homes are equipped with smart meters and real-time pricing, research shows that energy use typically drops. Google is looking at ways that we can use our information technology and our reach to help increase awareness and bring better, real-time information to consumers.
(2) Develop renewable energy that is cheaper than coal (RE<C)
Google’s data centers draw from a U.S. electricity grid that relies on coal for 50% of its power. We want to help catalyze the development of renewable energy that is price competitive with coal. At least three technologies show tremendous promise: wind, solar thermal, and advanced geothermal. Each of these is abundant and, when combined, could supply energy in virtually every region of the U.S.
This year
Google has invested
over $45 million in startup companies with breakthrough wind, solar and geothermal technologies through our Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (
RE<C
) initiative, but that is a drop when we need a flood. We need to unleash massive private investment in clean energy. The government can have a big impact here as well. We must dramatically increase federal R&D and enact measures supporting the rapid deployment and scaling of clean technologies such as long-term tax support and a national renewable energy standard. Tax credits for wind and solar have lapsed several times in the last 20 years, starving these nascent industries of the capital they need to truly enter the mainstream.
We also must work both sides of the
RE<C
equation. Progress will be accelerated when the price of carbon reflects its true costs to society. Putting a price on carbon through cap-and-trade or a carbon tax would help address this.
(3) Electrify transportation and re-invent our electric grid
Imagine driving a car that uses no gas and is less expensive to recharge than buying a latte. A "smart grid" allows you to charge when electricity is cheap, and maybe even make some money by selling unused power back to the grid when it's needed. Plug-in cars are on their way, with GM, Toyota and other manufacturers planning introductions in the next two years. At Google we have a small fleet of Toyota Prius and Ford Escape plug-in conversions, as a part of our RechargeIT program. The converted Prius plug-ins get over 90 MPG, and the Escapes close to 50 MPG. However to successfully put millions of plug-in cars on the road and and fuel them with green electricity, we need a smart grid that manages when we charge and how we're billed. A smart grid could also provide for the two-way flow of electricity, as well as large-scale integration of intermittent solar and wind energy. Much of the technology in our current electrical grid was developed in the 60s and is wasteful and not very smart. We are
partnering with GE
to help accelerate the development of the smart grid and support building new transmission lines to harness our nation's vast renewable energy resources.
We see a huge opportunity for the nation to confront our energy challenges. In the process we will stimulate investment, create jobs, empower consumers and, by the way, help address climate change.
Posted by Dan Reicher, Director, Climate Change and Energy Initiatives, and Jeffery Greenblatt, Climate and Energy Technology Manager, Google.org
Saving electricity one data center at a time
10/1/08
Hundreds of millions of users access our services through the web, and this traffic requires lots of computers. We strive to offer great Internet services while taking our energy use very seriously. That's why, nearly a decade ago, we started work to optimize the energy efficiency of our servers and later set out to build the most environmentally sustainable data centers possible. We now believe that Google-designed data centers are the most efficient in the world.
The graph below shows what we've achieved: our data centers use considerably less energy for the servers themselves, and much less energy for cooling, than a typical data center. We achieved this milestone by significantly reducing the amount of energy needed for the data center facility overhead. Specifically, Google-designed data centers use nearly five times less energy than conventional facilities to feed and cool the computers inside. Our engineers worked hard to optimize every element in the data center, from the chip to the cooling tower.
As a result, the energy used per Google search is minimal. In the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will use more energy than we will use to answer your query. To learn more about our 5-step approach to efficiency, please check out our new
website
about efficient data centers.
Posted by Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations
Building a future that's clean and green
9/22/08
The Internet has had an enormous impact on people's lives around the world in the ten years since Google's founding. It has changed politics, entertainment, culture, business, health care, the environment and just about every other topic you can think of. Which got us to thinking, what's going to happen in the next ten years? How will this phenomenal technology evolve, how will we adapt, and (more importantly) how will it adapt to us? We asked ten of our top experts this very question, and during September (our 10th anniversary month) we are presenting
their responses
. As computer scientist Alan Kay has famously observed, the best way to predict the future is to invent it, so we will be doing our best to make good on our experts' words every day. - Karen Wickre and Alan Eagle, series editors
At Grist.org they have a saying about climate change: "A frog in water doesn't feel it boil in time. Dude, we are that frog."
It isn't very Googley to stand on the sidelines – whether the challenge involves search, apps, or clean energy. So we're working to be part of the solution. Specifically, we have embraced the challenge of developing a gigawatt of renewable electricity that is cheaper than electricity from coal – in years, not decades.(We call it RE<C. Not only is it a cool, nerdy name for the project, it breaks HTML pages everywhere.)
In ten years, we envision a cleaner, greener world -- running on wind, solar, and steam - with clean cars plugged into a clean grid. But for that vision to become real, the technologies to power it will have to be economically competitive -- otherwise they won't scale. So we are focusing much of our effort on technology innovation to drive down the costs of key renewable technologies. We are fundamentally optimists -- we believe that when innovative people focus on the right problems, they can find solutions. And when renewable energy is cheaper than fossil-based alternatives, and when plug-in hybrids are as cheap as traditional cars, they will take off in the marketplace.
Our company founders, Larry and Sergey, are engineers and when they encouraged our team to tackle this issue we knew they would prefer a technological approach. This summer, we welcomed at our Mountain View headquarters the first Google engineers dedicated exclusively to exploring the development of utility-scale clean energy at a price cheaper than coal.
But we need a thousand groups of engineers focused on developing renewable energy - not just the team we're building at Google. That means we need government to set the right incentives and regulatory environment to foster clean energy innovation and R&D. Our team is also working to advance a policy agenda that stimulates clean energy projects.
We're getting the word out about tax credits, government research funding, renewable portfolio standards, and the limitations of our current transmission grid. Our philanthropic arm is doing its part too. The climate team at Google.org is working to complement the work of our engineering team with grants and investments in clean energy projects. To date, we've invested over $45 million in breakthrough technologies like solar thermal, advanced wind, and enhanced geothermal systems.
It will take the concerted efforts of many -- but dude, we don't need to be that frog.
Posted by Bill Weihl, Green Energy Czar
Variability or Change?
9/19/08
For years, first scientists, then the media and politicians debated whether the observed global warming trend is due to natural variability or human-induced changes in the climate system. Fortunately, this debate has now been mostly put to rest with the release of the
fourth assessment
of
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) last year, which stated: “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal….(and) most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations”
However, the variability vs. change discussion is now taking on a new life. This time the debate is not focused on attributing a cause to global warming but rather what to do about adapting to it impacts. Is improving management to current climate variability – an adaptation strategy? Or is climate adaptation more about developing strategies to manage the severe climate change impacts projected for 20-50 years in the future?
Questions such as these arose in a recent
workshop
that Google.org sponsored in Kenya on climate and health. "Are we talking about climate variability or climate change?" participants would ask during working groups focused on identifying strategies for reducing vulnerability to the emergence and spread of climate-sensitive diseases.
The crux of the variability vs. change discussion began when Phil Thornton from ILRI presented an overview of the state of the science on climate projections which highlighted the huge uncertainty in projections from the Global Climate Models (GCMs) out toward the middle and end of century. Then Caroline Kisia, executive director of
Action Africa Help International
(AAHI) and a medical doctor who works with communities in Kenya, spoke up and explained that the climate science stuff is interesting…but it is not clear what communities are supposed to do with this information – there is too much uncertainty to define any real actions here.
A few case studies were then presented showing how weather and seasonal climate projections have the potential for improving management for climate-sensitive diseases such as rift valley fever, malaria, meningitis and dengue. These seemed to be helpful, but how are they related to climate adaptation?
These are all good points and good questions. It seems that Caroline was asking the climate scientists and health experts in the room to put aside their fancy models and labels and just focus on the community needs.
Communities today across the globe, and especially in Africa, have many needs related to managing the risks of climate and weather– including floods, droughts, and climate-sensitive diseases. The workshop discussions highlighted the opportunities and challenges of connecting the climate and health sectors to build tools for managing these risks.
Ultimately, for the poorest regions of the world facing the increasing threats from climate change, adaption is in large part simply about a heightened need for communities and nations to do what they need to do anyway in pursuit of sustainable development – such as improve health services, develop drought-resistant crop options and diversify income sources.
Does this all then just come down to semantics? At the community level it may be best not to worry about labels such as variability, change or adaptation. However, the implications of these semantics may be far reaching as policymakers to develop much needed
climate adaptation assistance programs
and face important questions such as who should pay for climate adaptation in the poorest nations where communities are most vulnerable to but least responsible for the changes underway? And what should be paid for, that is, what constitutes climate adaptation?
These are tough questions. I am optimistic that if we don't get stuck on the semantics but keep our eyes on our goals we will find solutions to enable the most vulnerable populations to take the concrete actions needed to improve their health and livelihoods.
Rosemary Sang led a session on Rift Valley Fever (RVF) and the lessons learned from the
major RVF outbreak
in 2006-07 where 155 people died.
Posted by Amy Luers, Environment Program Manager, Predict and Prevent
Debating - and agreeing - on energy policy
9/19/08
Disagreements may make headlines in the energy policy debate, but you know we're getting somewhere when an oil company executive, a foreign policy expert, and Dan Reicher, Google.org's Director of Climate Change and Energy Initiatives, agree on the most effective way of lowering today's high energy costs: improving energy efficiency.
This past Friday, Dan Reicher participated with these and other experts in an
energy summit
convened by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee ahead of possible votes on legislative proposals pending in Congress. Energy has taken center stage in D.C. during this short session before the October recess, and more than two dozen senators participated in the summit's morning session alone.
Dan and other member of the panel stressed the importance of improving energy efficiency as the low-hanging fruit in the energy policy debate. He pointed to the role of IT in making homes, businesses, and appliances more efficient, and he called on Senators to consider setting more aggressive national efficiency standards like those in place today in California.
Dan also emphasized the need to extend renewable energy tax credits. During this discussion, senators expressed particular interest in the promise of
enhanced geothermal systems
(EGS) technology which Google has championed in recent months. Many participants also emphasized the need to make tax incentives more consistent and reliable to avoid sending "stop-and-go" signals to businesses and investors.
Check out the
video archive
of this summit to learn more.
Posted by
Harry Wingo, Policy Counsel, Google
Partnering with GE on clean energy
9/18/08
Yesterday, we
announced
that we're
joining forces
(PDF file) with
GE
to use technology, information and corporate resources to drive the changes necessary to empower consumers with better energy choices. Eric Schmidt and GE CEO Jeff Immelt discuss solutions to our energy challenge in this video:
Posted by Katy Bacon, Google.org Team
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