Green Blog
A better web. Better for the environment.
Washington plugs into the smart grid
2/18/09
Just one week after launching Google's
energy information
campaign, we kicked off our first joint
smart grid event
with GE, a larger clean energy collaboration we
announced
last fall. Our timing was fortuitous; the event took place just as President Obama signed an historic economic stimulus bill that includes $11 billion to modernize the electricity grid.
Getting energy information into the hands of consumers requires reworking the electricity grid to make it smarter. At yesterday's event, hosted in Google's Washington office, experts explored what the fundamental elements of a smarter grid should be -- from empowering consumers with information, tools, and choices to manage their energy use, to creating an open system that encourages innovation, to enabling a massive scale up of renewable energy sources and plug-in vehicles. We also explored the government's role in accelerating these efforts. Our panelists were enthusiastic about the opportunity created by the stimulus, but also noted the government's challenge of getting the money out the door in an effective and efficient manner.
Some highlights from the event:
GE's film clip
highlighting a smart grid project in Oklahoma
An appearance by
Carol Browner
, President Obama's senior energy official in the White House, who noted with delight the packed crowd of over 450 people
Former astronaut and current Googler,
Ed Lu
, making the case for open standards and user access to energy information on our technology panel
Our very own Dan Reicher shamelessly punning that "we want to help build a
fridge
to the 21st century," a play on
Bill Clinton's '96 campaign mantra
To stay plugged into our energy information campaign and learn about developments along the road to a smarter grid, be sure to
join our Google Group
.
UPDATE: Watch the
event video
on YouTube.
Posted by Michael Terrell, Google.org Program Manager
Stimulating clean energy RD&D
2/18/09
We must quickly develop low-cost renewable and efficient energy technology to avoid the devastating effects of climate change. This requires a strong financial commitment to clean energy research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) to achieve big breakthroughs.
Historically such funding has been anemic. After a peak in 1978 of
$7 billion
, U.S. government funding for energy RD&D dropped by more than 70%. Corporate RD&D fell even more, and
funding in the early 2000s
totaled just 0.3% of sector revenue, compared to 15% in the biotech sector. Is it any wonder the energy sector has struggled to make progress?
What level of energy RD&D funding is needed?
Kammen and Nemet
look at several different metrics and suggest that a sustained level between $20-40 billion is needed to reinvigorate the field. Recent activities push in the right direction:
2008 funding
reached $3 billion, 50% higher than during the early 2000s, and the
stimulus bill
recently signed into law adds $3.25 billion in new RD&D funding for clean energy. But to have a truly transformative effect, investment needs to climb even higher.
In addition, without emphasizing the "R" in RD&D, we will produce only incremental improvements. We need to prime the innovation pump in order to produce more high-quality ideas that produce radically better (and cheaper) technologies. This will provide long-term job growth, and also increase consumers' buying power, stimulating the economy.
Funding must also be coupled with long-term demand for clean technology. This gives companies confidence their investments will pay out, and assures students entering the field that jobs won't evaporate. Research must also focus more on clean tech; in recent years only 40% of
energy RD&D funding
has gone to renewable energy and energy efficiency.
At Google we've learned some that might be successfully applied to energy:
"Put the user first and all else follows."
For instance, customers care about saving money, but only if it's easy to measure. Providing ways to cheaply
monitor energy consumption
is a powerful first step.
"Great just isn't good enough."
Cost-parity for renewables is required for long-term competitiveness, but to replace conventional technology we must develop
renewable electricity cheaper than coal
, the least expensive fossil fuel.
"Launch early and often."
Instead of waiting for perfection, get new technologies into the marketplace quickly, then improve through iteration.
These strategies will make sure that the widest possible set of ideas are considered, increasing the number of breakthroughs. A "fail fast" policy would allocate people to the great ideas, with high-impact results guaranteeing continued funding, particularly at the critical demonstration stage where many technologies fail to attract sufficient capital. Carrying projects over this "Valley of Death" to full commercialization will ultimately result in the best, lowest-cost technologies rapidly reaching the market. For the sake of the planet, clean energy can't arrive soon enough.
Check out this excellent complementary
set of recommendations
recently published by Harvard's Belfer Center.
Posted by Jeffery
Greenblatt,
Climate and Energy Technology Manager
Power to the people
2/9/09
(Cross-posted from the
Official Google Blog
)
Imagine how hard it would be to stick to a budget in a store with no prices. Well, that's pretty much how we buy electricity today. Your utility company sends you a bill at the end of the month with very few details. Most people don't know how much electricity their appliances use, where in the house they are wasting electricity, or how much the bill might go up during different seasons. But in a world where everyone had a detailed understanding of their home energy use, we could find all sorts of ways to save energy and lower electricity bills. In fact,
studies show
that access to home energy information results in savings between 5-15% on monthly electricity bills. It may not sound like much, but if half of America's households cut their energy demand by 10 percent, it would be the equivalent of taking eight million cars off the road.
Google’s mission is to "organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful," and we believe consumers have a right to detailed information about their
home electricity use
. We're tackling the challenge on several fronts, from policy advocacy to developing consumer tools, and even investing in smart grid companies. We've been participating in the dialogue in Washington, DC and with public agencies in the U.S. and other parts of the world to advocate for investment in the building of a "smart grid," to bring our 1950s-era electricity grid into the digital age. Specifically, to provide both consumers and utilities with real-time energy information, homes must be equipped with advanced energy meters called "smart meters." There are currently about 40 million smart meters in use worldwide, with plans to add another 100 million in the next few years.
But deploying smart meters alone isn't enough. This needs to be coupled with a strategy to provide customers with easy access to energy information. That's why we believe that open protocols and standards should serve as the cornerstone of smart grid projects, to spur innovation, drive competition, and bring more information to consumers as the smart grid evolves. We believe that detailed data on your personal energy use belongs to you, and should be available in an open standard, non-proprietary format. You should control who gets to see your data, and you should be free to choose from a wide range of services to help you understand it and benefit from it. For more details on our policy suggestions, check out the
comments
we filed yesterday with the California Public Utility Commission.
In addition to policy advocacy, we're building consumer tools, too. Over the last several months, our engineers have developed a software tool called
Google PowerMeter
, which will show consumers their home energy information almost in real time, right on their computer. Google PowerMeter is not yet available to the public since we're
testing it out
with Googlers first. But we're
building partnerships
with utilities and independent device manufacturers to gradually roll this out in pilot programs. Once we've had a chance to kick the tires, we'll make the tool more widely available.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution to providing consumers with detailed energy information. And it will take the combined efforts of federal and state governments, utilities, device manufacturers, and software engineers to empower consumers to use electricity more wisely by giving them access to energy information.
Posted by Ed Lu, Engineering Team
More computing, less power
1/27/09
In the fall we posted information about the
efficiency of Google data centers
and promised to update this information every quarter. We've now collected data for the fourth quarter of 2008 and published them to our
sustainable computing website
. Specifically, we're keeping track of the efficiency of any Google-designed data center with an IT load of at least 5 MW and a time-in-operation of at least 6 months. In Q4 our average power and cooling overhead in these facilities was 16%, bringing the overhead for the trailing 12 months to 19% (down from 21% a quarter earlier). For comparison, a recent EPA report put the overhead of the average enterprise data center at 100% or higher. We're very happy to have further improved our efficiency, and a number of factors contributed to that result.
First, efficiency is affected by seasonal weather patterns — cooler weather is better than hot weather, and several of our facilities benefited from that in Q4. Also, we continually review our efficiency metrics so that we notice, for example, that one of our data centers is not performing consistently with others of similar size and locale. So we'll take a closer look at optimizing that facility. Are we using fans to cool spaces that don't need to be cooled? Is the thermostat at the right set-point? Can we reduce the time the chillers need to run while keeping the machines operational? So we apply lessons we've learned from better-performing data centers to other facilities, and several such improvements took place in Q4. For the nitty-gritty technical details, visit our
data center efficiency page
.
While we've made a lot of progress in data center efficiency, we're still learning. As we continue to explore ways to use the least amount of power to do the most amount of computing, we'll continue to share our data and best practices with you. In early March we will participate in the
CeBIT conference
where we plan to disclose more details on our sustainability efforts as part of this year's theme of "Green IT." Stay tuned.
Posted by Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations
Where does our oil come from?
12/18/08
There’s a great deal of talk about the high cost of oil and the billions of dollars that the US and other oil-importing nations spend each year to buy oil. As part of the
Google.org Geo Challenge Grants Program
,
Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI)
has
created a map
of US oil imports by country since 1973. By clicking on the green light to play, you can see the countries supplying oil to the U.S. (either in terms of barrels or dollar value) and how our imports have changed over the last 35 years.The thicker the line in the map, the more oil produced or imported. While this map highlights data on United States oil imports, the picture is similar for every oil-importing country in the world.
The
map
highlights 5 eras of oil consumption, from the oil shocks of the 1970s to the price collapse in the 1980s to recent events including Hurricane Katrina and gas approaching $5 per gallon before retreating rapidly recently. (You can see these selections by clicking on the buttons below the map on the RMI website.) One interesting time period is from 1982 to 1985, when low prices caused oil imports from the Middle East to decline to very low levels.
The map also looks at potential oil from offshore drilling and exploration of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). The screenshot below illustrates the impact of off-shore drilling. With the map zoomed or ‘drilled’ 3-5 levels down and centered near Alabama (and the map pushpin that represents offshore), check out the very thin line that shows the potential peak production of 220,000 barrels per day.The lines represent estimates of production in 20-30 years, and even with this very long timeline, the amount of oil that could be generated from offshore drilling is miniscule compared to our oil needs today.
Both Google and RMI are working hard to help create a future where we are not reliant on daily imports of millions of barrels of oil that pollute our atmosphere and risk our national security.
Today, along with the Brookings Institution, RMI is hosting “
The Oil Solutions Initiative
” a summit to identify solutions to break America’s dependence on oil, with Google in attendance. In 2004, RMI’s Chief Scientist, Chairman and Co-founder Amory Lovins and a team of RMI collaborators drafted Winning the Oil Endgame (
PDF of the book
) - a roadmap for the United States to get completely off oil by 2050.
Google.org’s
RechargeIT initiative
is driving toward the commercialization of plug-in vehicles that can wean the US off gasoline. In our
Clean Energy 2030 Plan
we show that increasing conventional automobile mileage, deploying millions of plug-in hybrids and accelerating the turnover of the fleet would reduce oil consumption by 51% by 2030. That decrease would have an even larger effect on oil imports because we produce about one-third of our oil in the US. Google and RMI have worked together on a number of projects including RMI’s
Smart Garage
Charrette
, a summit to identify the barriers and breakthroughs needed to electrify the U.S. auto fleet.
While oil prices have declined rapidly over the past five months, most people expect oil prices to remain high into the near future. When asked whether or not the drop in oil prices reduces the need to act, President-Elect Barack Obama
responded
that we go from “shock to trance” and as a result “never make any progress.”
If you are a non-profit with a great idea like this one, please consider
applying
for
funding
to develop your project. We are currently accepting applications for the December 22, 2008 deadline.
Posted by David Bercovich, Program Manager, Google.org
Eric Schmidt speaks about solutions for energy security
11/24/08
Google CEO Eric Schmidt spoke last Thursday at a Natural Resources Defense Council event held at Google offices in New York. The topic for the evening was "Partnership for the Earth: Strategies and Solutions for Energy Security." Eric spoke about Google's
Clean Energy 2030 plan
and the importance of rebuilding America's energy infrastructure.
The speech was followed by a panel discussion featuring Frances Beinecke, President of the Natural Resources Defense Council, Ralph Cavanaugh, co-director of NRDC's energy program, and Dan Reicher, Director of Climate Change and Energy Initiatives at Google.org.
You can check out the talk here:
Posted by Jamie Yood, Google.org Team
Moving quickly to rebuild the economy through clean energy
11/20/08
With a new President and Congress, we have an unprecedented opportunity to transform our fossil fuel economy to one based largely on clean energy, while creating millions of jobs in the process.
Last month, we offered a
Clean Energy 2030
proposal for how the U.S. can dramatically scale up renewable energy, become smarter about how we use energy, and deploy millions of plug-in electric cars. Our energy team has continued crunching the numbers and just posted new data on job creation and cost savings on our
knol
. We'll keep updating the information and encourage everyone to take a look and comment - and offer alternative approaches if you disagree.
Reaching the goals of Clean Energy 2030 will require a comprehensive effort by the new President and Congress. At a minimum, we believe it should include putting a price on carbon emissions, setting national energy efficiency and renewable energy goals, and modernizing our electricity grid. With the right policies, we can drive trillions of dollars of new investment in clean energy and create millions of new jobs.
Stimulating the economy and creating jobs will be the first item of business when the new President and Congress take office in January. We hope that clean energy will be front and center. In its last effort to address the financial crisis, Congress passed several
measures to advance clean energy
, but much more needs to be done. Here are some ideas on how to advance clean energy as part of a stimulus package:
Get money flowing to renewable energy.
Many wind and solar project developers can’t take advantage of the renewable tax credits that were just extended. The continuing economic decline has wiped out profits in many companies - and the otherwise expected tax liability that credits offset. Congress should make changes, such as making the credits refundable, to make it possible for investors to get the value Congress intended.
Start building a smarter electricity grid.
The last large
energy bill
passed in 2007 authorized, but did not fund, matching grants and demonstration programs to encourage investment in a "smart" electricity grid. These programs should be fully funded and expanded so more consumers have the opportunity to better monitor and control their electricity use and reduce their bills. A new
Department of Energy
(DOE) sponsored
book
explaining smart grid describes it as "the internet brought to our electric system."
Help people make their homes more efficient.
The DOE has a
Weatherization Assistance Program
that enables low-income families to permanently reduce their energy bills by making their homes more energy efficient. On average, weatherization reduces households' heating bills by about 30%. President-elect Obama adopted our proposal to weatherize one million low income homes per year for the next 10 years. Current federal weatherization funding supports barely 10% of that number. A roughly $3 billion appropriation would weatherize roughly one million homes.
Green the Government.
The U.S. government is the largest consumer of electricity. Accordingly, federal departments and agencies should lead by example when it comes to stimulating the economy through expanded energy efficiency efforts and increased use of clean energy. In addition, the Congress and the President can provide support to State and local governments for efficiency and smart grid projects; the purchase of renewable power; and converting vehicle fleets to low-emission vehicles, particularly plug-in electric cars and trucks. Such concerted government action will speed the advent of a new era of energy security and domestic job creation.
We need quick action to jumpstart the economy and improve energy security. If you have ideas to share, join the discussion on the
Clean Energy 2030 knol
.
Posted by Michael Terrell, Program Manager, Google.org and Harry Wingo, Policy Counsel, Google
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