What has Google done to win the love of green energy geeks?
The company is all over the place today, with an extensive Q and A with company green energy czar Bill Weihl in Green, Inc., and a piece in Green Tech about the company’s new Google Energy subsidiary.
The search giant’s devotion to sourcing affordable green energy for its data centers and venture capital investments in eSolar, BrightSource and geothermal interest AltaRock Energy are all mentioned at length.
Weihl also talks about the company’s 70-20-10 approach to its internal investments on technology, from search to energy. He says.
Seventy percent is the main core services, 20 percent is the next layer of things right around the corner, and 10 percent is just wacky stuff. Some people might look at that and say, ‘I don’t see any relationship between that and Google’s business.’ And then maybe five years later they’ll say, ‘Whoa, it’s a good thing you guys thought about that.’
This seems great, because Google is a highly successful business that has transformed advertising, email and the Web in general.
But does the company’s track record in its core businesses give us any reason to believe it can do the same to green energy?
Weihl seems to think so, citing the company’s “culture of innovation.”
But some of this talk just smacks of hubris: If Google built a better search engine, why can’t it also develop a cure for cancer or make renewable energy scalable and affordable? Because success in one area does not guarantee, or even correlate with, success in the other.
One need only recall Google-backed AltaRock Energy’s recent abandonment of its Geysers drilling project to see how green energy can go wrong.
Green Tech’s story is a more measured account of the company’s attempts to pursue carbon neutrality and be able to buy green energy on the wholesale market, with approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
But this program too, smacks of overreach.
The company has invested about $50 million since 2007 in internal and external investments to make renewable energy cheaper than coal. Officials have lots more money to spend but they can’t find enough good projects out there.
Frankly, Google’s investments in this area are just too small for it to become, or to be a support hub for, the new Bell Labs of green energy.