Green Blog
A better web. Better for the environment.
Cash for a clunker
8/7/09
Ever since college, I've been driving the same car: a 2000 Nissan XTerra. It's been a great car and, after more than 100,000 miles, it has a lot of memories: a ski trip to Lake Tahoe through a blizzard, driving down the I5 to Los Angeles, driving across the entire country and then back! However, over the last few years I started to feel guilty about the how much gas my car managed to guzzle. The official stats claimed 19 miles-per-gallon on the highway, but they must have been driving slower than I do because I never saw that sort of mileage. So, I was excited when the government approved the "Cash for Clunkers" program!
I talked it over with my wife, and we decided it was time to upgrade to a more environmentally friendly car. We looked around, and decided to get a Toyota Prius. After checking out the
Cash for Clunkers website
, I figured out that because the Prius is rated at 50 mpg, well more than 10 mpg more than the 16 mpg my XTerra currently rates, we were eligible for a $4,500 trade-in value through the program. That made the Prius not only a environmentally friendly choice, but an economically attractive one as well. We found a
participating dealer
nearby and headed over to trade in our clunker.
After a quick test drive and some effective negotiations, we struck a deal and bought the new car. As always, there was quite a bit of paperwork involved, including a few extra pages for the "Cash for Clunkers" program. (Then again, $4,500 is certainly worth a couple of pages of paperwork.) After signing on the dotted line, the car was ours.
Just today President Barack Obama
signed a bill
extending funding for this incredibly popular program, which burned through its $1 billion budget in just one week. It's not often you can get something you want, feel like you're doing something good for the planet, and get $4,500 for doing it. So consider trading in your clunker for a more fuel-efficient model this weekend!
Posted by Jeff Keltner, Business Development Manager
Turning on the Solar Power Tower
8/6/09
In 2007 Google.org
launched
our
Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal
initiative and announced a $10 million investment in the early-stage clean power company
eSolar, Inc
. Yesterday in Southern California, eSolar flipped the switch on what is to be the first solar power tower facility in the U.S. that will enter full commercial operation.
Success here could signal the emergence of a clean energy technology by which we might -- for the first time -- economically harness the sun to produce large quantities of electricity. And we would be harnessing a massive and, for all practical purposes, inexhaustible energy supply.
In many respects eSolar has turned conventional thinking about solar power tower technology on its head in order to drastically reduce the capital and operating cost of solar thermal power plants. Instead of employing a small number of large and expensive specialty mirrors eSolar takes the opposite approach – incorporating thousands of small mirrors that can be made cheaply in massive quantities. And instead of having to reinforce large mirrors to stand up to high winds, eSolar’s small mirrors have a low profile, reducing material costs including steel and concrete for the mounting structures.
Of course this massive number of mirrors requires more sophisticated software so they accurately track the sun leading to high heat output and system efficiency. At Google we’re particularly intrigued with this aspect of the eSolar product -- that is, how the performance of energy technology can be enhanced by information technology. Call it ET meets IT.
The eSolar team has taken a giant step toward cracking the code on solar power tower technology. I’m hopeful that just a few years from now we will see this facility – and many more like it – focusing the sun’s energy to produce a brighter future for our children and the planet they will inherit.
Posted by Dan Reicher, Director of Climate Change & Energy Initaitives
The vast potential of energy efficiency
8/6/09
(Cross-posted from the
Public Policy Blog
)
It's no surprise that the cheapest and most available solution to the climate problem is simply to use energy more efficiently. But a
recent study
issued by
McKinsey & Co.
details just how compelling an opportunity we are missing. McKinsey predicts that an annual investment of roughly $50 billion over the next 10 years would cut energy demand by 23% and yield savings to the U.S. economy worth $1.2 trillion! The energy savings would be equal to taking the entire U.S. passenger fleet of cars and trucks off the road.
Such efficiency gains are possible only if we overcome some major hurdles. For instance, most people have no idea how much energy we use in our homes on a daily basis or which of our appliances or devices are consuming the most energy. That's one of the reasons that we created
Google PowerMeter
, a software gadget that shows users detailed information on their home electricity consumption.
Studies show
that when people have access to this kind information they reduce their energy use by up to 15%. Greater savings are possible if people use the information to buy a more efficient refrigerator or air conditioner, insulate their home, or take advantage of off-peak electricity rates.
The McKinsey report acknowledges that energy efficiency alone won't solve our energy and climate challenges. We must continue to put major resources into low-carbon sources of energy like
renewable energy
, and the
federal economic stimulus
, with its tens of billions of
targeted dollars and incentives
, is a good start. But the McKinsey findings are a wake up call. As we enact more comprehensive energy policies, energy efficiency -- and giving people the information, tools and incentives to take advantage of it -- should be front and center.
Posted by Michael Terrell, Program Manager, Google.org
Should you spring clean your solar panels?
7/31/09
Ever since we
assembled a 1.6 MW solar panel installation
at our
headquarters
in Mountain View in 2007, we've been wondering, "Does cleaning the solar panels make them more effective?" We thought it might, but we needed to be sure. So we analyzed the mountains of data that we collect about the energy that these panels produce — after rain, after cleaning and at different times of the year.
We have two different sets of solar panels on our campus — completely flat ones installed on carports, and
rooftop ones
that are tilted.
Since the carport solar panels have no tilt, rain doesn't do a good job of rinsing off the dirt they collect. (Also, our carports are situated across from a sand field, which doesn't help the situation.) We cleaned these panels for the first time after they had been in operation for 15 months, and their energy output doubled overnight. When we cleaned them again eight months later, their output instantly increased by 36 percent. In fact, we found that cleaning these panels is the #1 way to maximize the energy they produce. As a result, we've added the carport solar panels to our spring cleaning checklist.
The rooftop solar panels are a different story. Our data indicates that rain does a sufficient job of cleaning the tilted solar panels. Some dirt does accumulate in the corners, but the resulting reduction in energy output is fairly small — and cleaning tilted panels does not significantly increase their energy production. So for now, we'll let Mother Nature take care of cleaning our rooftop panels.
Accumulated dirt in the corners of a rooftop solar panel
We've also been crunching numbers on dollars-and-cents; the more energy our panels produce, the sooner we'll be paid back by our solar investment. Our analysis now predicts that Google's system will pay for itself in about six and a half years, which is even better than we initially expected.
If you want to learn more about our solar study, check out these
slides
showing the effects that seasonality, tilt, dirt, particulate matter, rain and cleaning have on Google's solar energy output. We hope you solar panel owners out there can tailor our analysis to the specifics of your own installation to produce some extra energy of your own!
Posted by Winnie Lam, Senior Product Manager
Smart Meters for Smart Energy Consumption
7/16/09
The new Swedish Presidency of the European Union has rightly put the climate change challenge as one of its priorities. Next week, Europe's environment and energy ministers will
meet
in the Swedish town of
Åre
. Together they hope to develop synergies on climate change, energy-efficiency, innovation and competitiveness.
We made the case recently on this blog for an
Energy Information Policy
that would harness the power of information technology to support social change. In general, information technology can play a key role in giving citizens access to data that helps drive environmentally friendly behaviour. In particular, we suggested that the deployment of smart meters was a huge opportunity, especially as we would be building on an area of existing European leadership.
Smart meters collect real, or near real, time information on energy use. When this is reflected back to users, studies show that this has a significant impact on end consumer behaviour: On average, household energy savings amount to 5 - 15%. Even greater savings are possible if this information is used to see the value of retiring an old refrigerator, installing a new air conditioner or insulating the home.
The potential impact of large numbers of people achieving similar efficiencies is even more exciting. For every six households that save 10% on electricity, for instance, we reduce carbon emissions as much as taking one conventional
car
off the road.
We wanted to leverage these large energy opportunities for our users, so we created Google
PowerMeter
. It receives information from utility smart meters and energy management devices and provides customers with access to their home electricity consumption right on their personal
iGoogle
homepage.
The positive effects are already visible in our
first pilot agreements
for Powermeter with utility companies around the world. Just recently, we announced our latest partner and first European utility,
Yello Strom
, in Germany. Yello uses one of the globally most advanced smart metering technologies, giving users real-time feedback on their energy consumption.
Many of our internal users have seen significant savings opportunities through being a pilot tester for PowerMeter, and
all
of them have become much more aware of energy lingo, and, much more importantly, just what it means to leave your HiFi on standby the whole day round (it translated to an impressive 140 Euros yearly savings
for me
).
When fed into a social network context, we believe the value of getting access to energy information could be even greater. For example, imagine setting a savings target for yourself, sharing it with selected friends, and getting pinged if you exceed or miss your targets.
"Energy education" - making users aware of kiloWatt hours, and the Euro costs they translate into, is one of the key tasks when trying to make this planet greener. We are only at the beginning, and PowerMeter is a small puzzle piece in this much larger challenge. Most people that you would ask on the street would be able to tell you the price of a litre of petrol, or what they spend on their mobile phone bill per month, but very few know hard facts about their energy consumption or cost. Do you? We strongly believe there's a lot of room for change here.
At Google, we have been interacting with policy makers, industry leadership and industry influencers a lot in the past year. It is truly exciting to see that many of the experts' expected developments in that space are well aligned with our idea of making more information accessible to the end user.
This will ultimately lead to lower energy bills, more informed users and a planet a little greener, and we greatly applaud technology, projects and policy that can help drive this trend.
Posted by Jens Redmer, Principal, New Business Development, and Benjamin Kott, Green Business Operations Manager, EMEA
German utility partners with Google PowerMeter - willkommen!
6/30/09
Earlier today we announced on the
Google Germany Blog
that
Yello Strom
is our first Google PowerMeter partner in Europe. With over 1.4 million customers, Yello is among Germany's ten largest electricity companies and the very first company to offer commercial smart meters nationwide in Germany.
When Yello Executive Director Martin Vesper gave us a demo of the Sparzähler meter a few months ago, it felt like fate -- Yello's solution for making energy information easy-to-access and easy-to-act-upon aligns perfectly with our vision for
Google PowerMeter
. The Sparzähler meter's broadband connectivity makes it possible for Google PowerMeter users to see 15 minute interval data nearly in real time. (Its design is also pretty sleek, we think.)
Google PowerMeter now has
nine utility partners
around the world, large and small -- and each partner shares our goal of giving customers easy access to their own home energy usage information.
We hear from utilities around the world that are interested in enabling their customers to use Google PowerMeter. At the moment, we're focused on working with those utilities that can collect a minimum of hourly data (that's 24 reads a day) and deliver it to Google within one day. If you work for a utility with these kind of capabilities and are interested in getting your customers Google PowerMeter, please
let us know
!
Posted by Tom Sly, New Business Development
Happy World Environment Day
6/5/09
Today is
World Environment Day
and I wanted to point your attention to a major initiative that just launched and is supported by Google: The Prince of Wales'
Prince's Rainforest Project
, dedicated to protecting the Amazon rainforest. Check out this
video
featuring supporters from around the world, including Google's very own CEO,
Eric Schmidt
- and some adorable frogs. Prince Charles
spoke
about the destruction of the rainforest and other challenges of the 21st century at our recent European Zeitgeist. As he has said, "If we lose the battle against tropical deforestation, we lose the battle against climate change."
Posted by Amit Sood, Sr. Product Marketing Manager
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