Despite the fact that some people still believe that an energy crisis may not be worth taking seriously, Google isn’t waiting around for a definitive verdict and instead has thrown its considerable weight behind the development of renewable energy sources. With previous contributions toward the development of wind farms and solar power, they’ve made one more addition to their portfolio of clean energy technology investments. Today in a blog announcement, Google announced that it has funneled millions of dollars into the solar power industry in California. From their blog:

We’ve made a new $94 million investment in a portfolio of four solar photovoltaic (PV) projects being built by Recurrent Energy near Sacramento, California. This brings our portfolio of clean energy investments to more than $915 million. We’ve already committed to providing funding this year to help more than 10,000 homeowners install solar PV panels on their rooftops. But this investment represents our first investment in the U.S. in larger scale solar PV power plants that generate energy for the grid—instead of on individual rooftops. These projects have a total capacity of 88 MW, equivalent to the electricity consumed by more than 13,000 homes.

The announcement details the search engine giant’s partnership with Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, a global investment firm, and Recurrent Energy, a developer of solar energy technology, in order to make the most of the investment so that “clean energy projects continue to attract new sources of capital to help the world move towards a more sustainable energy future.”

This latest green investment brings Google’s total contributions to clean energy projects to a cool $880 million. At this point, that figure is hard to even grasp. It reminds me of that scene in one of those Austin Powers movies when Dr. Evil demands a ransom of $1 trillion and the U.S. government laughs at him and his made-up number. At this point, it’s all Monopoly money. Worse, thinking about that staggering sum of money and how much that can do for the industry of renewable energy is awkwardly humbling when you consider that it might not even slow down the coming energy crisis.

Still, hats off to Google for taking the lead on this dire problem. Hopefully it will other inspire other major league tech companies to pick up the cause, as well.

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“As we said when we made our first residential solar investment, we think it makes a lot of sense to use solar photovoltaic (PV) technology—rooftop solar panels—to generate electricity right where you need it at home,” says Google Director of Green Business Operations Rick Needham. “It greens our energy mix by using existing roof space while avoiding transmission constraints, and it can be cheaper than drawing electricity from the traditional grid.”

“Purchasing a solar system is a major home improvement, but the upfront cost has historically been one of the biggest barriers for homeowners,” Needham adds. “Solar installers across the country don’t always have the resources to find financing for customers, or the capital to provide it themselves. And for investors like Google, banks and others, it can be difficult to enter a fragmented solar market with many companies, and get connected to individual homeowners.”

Clean Power Finance has an open platform to connect installers and investors (Google in this case) to help homeowners finance the changes.

“Solar installers sign up with Clean Power Finance to get access to the company’s comprehensive sales solutions, including consumer financing from investors, like the Google fund,” explains Needham. “This enables installers to sell more systems and grow their business. The installer builds the system, the investor (in this case, Google) owns it, and homeowners pay a monthly payment for the system, at a price that’s often less than paying for energy from the grid. Maintenance and performance are taken care of by Clean Power Finance and its network of installers.”

You can see more about Google’s various investments in clean energy here. They include, in addition to the Clean Power Finance investment, $280 in SolarCity (solar for residential rooftops), $10 million in Brightsource (solar), a 37.5% equity stake in Atlantic Wind Connection, $157 million in Alta Wind Energy Center, $100 million into Shepherd’s Flat (wind farm), $38.8 million into Peace Garden wind farms, and about $5 million in Photovoltaics (solar).

Google has had solar panels on its own headquarters since 2007.

“Powerhouse Dynamics’ integrated device partnership with Google PowerMeter provides our customers with one more level of convenience in viewing home power consumption,” said Powerhouse VP of Business Development Tim Durant.”

"eMonitor allows homeowners to monitor their circuit-level energy usage and provides the intelligence needed for identifying easy and actionable steps in lowering energy use, saving money and keeping homes safe.”

Google PowerMeter can be accessed via any Internet connected, and allows eMonitor uses to view home energy usage from their iGoogle homepage. An iGoogle gadget allows eMontior users to access their power consumption on Google’s free energy visualization tool.

To view real-time circuit or appliance-level power use, users can log onto their online eMonitor dashboard to determine electrical power consumption, set-up and receive alerts, view analyses and diagnostics, and receive cost-saving recommendations.

This test has apparently been in progress for a while in a rather isolated part of California (covering Plumas, Lassen and Sierra Counties), in fact, and Google, Spectrum Bridge, and the Plumas-Sierra Rural Electric Cooperative feel everything’s going well.

An official statement explained, "The applications deployed for the Plumas-Sierra ‘Smart Grid’ wireless network trial deliver real-time broadband connectivity to remote substations and switchgear, allowing PSREC System Operators to manage the Electrical system remotely, request critical data from substations, manage power flow and protect the system and employees while maintaining the local grid."

What’s more, this has turned into an opportunity for Google’s PowerMeter to be deployed, and "[t]he wireless network is also providing broadband access to an underserved community."

Just about everyone (except potential competitors) appears to be benefiting, then, and not a single drawback’s been identified (the organizations even took care that this white space experiment wouldn’t interfere with the reception regular TV channels).

Despite sharing all this promising information, Google and Spectrum Bridge weren’t quite ready to say when similar experiments might be repeated in other areas, however.

The list of groups includes some impressive names, including AT&T, Best Buy, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Nokia, Verizon, and Whirlpool.  As for their goals, one aim is to educate people about generation sources of electricity, another’s to spread information about pricing, and the third is to let individuals determine precisely how they’re using energy.

The president’s supposed to step in by asking federal agencies, state governments, and corporations to work together towards these ends.  He could convene White House summits, too, and even give consumers a bit of a nudge (with simple verbal encouragement or something like "Cash for Caulkers").

In return, the letter‘s signees promised, "We stand ready to assist you in your efforts to empower energy consumers, rebuild the economy, save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions."

It’s hard to imagine this appeal will go unanswered, so stand by to see if Google will begin to work with the government in yet another way.

Google recently applied for approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for the right to purchase and monetize energy, just like the utility companies you are already familiar with do. Google has said that its actions had more to do with the enormous amount of energy it consumes itself (consider all of the machinery and equipment it takes to keep a company like Google running at its current pace on a daily basis).

Questions have been raised however, about if Google could actually end up functioning as a utility. From the sounds of it, the company isn’t exactly ruling it out.

Jeffrey Marlow with the New York Times asked Google’s "Green Energy Czar" Bill Weihl if the company views its work on alternative energy as a money-making component. In his response, Weihl noted that some of Google’s initiatives come from Google.org (the company’s philanthropic arm), and said:

The reason Google.org is not just a foundation is that lots of people believe that if you want to have a big impact at scale on the world, then you need to go beyond what a 501(c)3 can do, which is to make charitable grants, so you need the ability to invest in companies, to do engineering projects, to do things that might at some point actually make money.

We’d be delighted if some of this stuff actually made money, obviously; it is not our goal to not make money. All else being equal, we’d like to make as much money as we can, but the principal goal is to have a big impact for good.

Google says its goal is to make renewable energy cheaper than coal. Coal is said to be the source of about half of the electricity consumed in the US. Google is looking at concentrated solar thermal, enhanced geothermal, and wind energies.

Related Articles:

> Google Gets Energetic Syndicate content

> How Much Energy is Consumed by a Google Search?

> Google Testing PowerMeter To Save Energy

Don’t scan this article for completion dates, price tags, or anything of that sort (and don’t bother clicking on the link and doing the same on the other side, either).  Google didn’t provide information along those lines.

What did happen is that Vint Cerf, Google’s chief Internet evangelist, wrote a post on the Public Policy Blog.  In it, he described the smart grid concept as which he described as "defining smarter ways to deliver and use energy" and "defining new ways to generate and exchange energy information."

He also mentioned Google’s work with the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), and pushed for open standards with respect to the electric grid.

The fact that Google got Cerf to tackle this subject is a sign that Google takes the smart grid very seriously.  Cerf is, after all, considered one of the fathers of the Internet, and he’s won enough awards to put most living scientists to shame.

Don’t worry if some time passes without Google fawning over algae-powered airplanes or other stuff of that nature, then.  The search giant’s still looking into it.

Eventually Google plans to make PowerMeter available to consumers who have homes equipped with advanced energy meters called "smart meters" There are about 40 million smart meters in use globally and plans are in the works to add another 100 million over the next few years.

The Google Blog offers more details on the companies efforts. "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."

Google says it is working on partnerships with utility and independent device manufacturers to introduce its PowerMeter gradually in pilot programs.
 

While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 Boiling a kettle generates about 15g. “Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power,” said Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist whose research on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon. “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.”

Google is secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint. It also refuses to divulge the locations of its data centres. However, with more than 200m internet searches estimated globally daily, the electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by computers and the internet is provoking concern. A recent report by Gartner, the industry analysts, said the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines – about 2% of global CO2 emissions. “Data centres are among the most energy-intensive facilities imaginable,” said Evan Mills, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Banks of servers storing billions of web pages require power.

In what appears to be a response to this article, Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations at Google, has put up a post on the Official Google Blog. Hölzle says:

But as computers become a bigger part of more people’s lives, information technology consumes an increasing amount of energy, and Google takes this impact seriously. That’s why we have designed and built the most energy efficient data centers in the world, which means the energy used per Google search is minimal. In fact, in the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will use more energy than Google uses to answer your query…

We’ve made great strides to reduce the energy used by our data centers, but we still want clean and affordable sources of electricity for the power that we do use. In 2008 our philanthropic arm, Google.org, invested $45 million in breakthrough clean energy technologies. And last summer, as part of our Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal initiative (RE<C), we created an internal engineering group dedicated to exploring clean energy.

Between those paragraphs, Hölzle explains why the estimates made in the article about Google’s energy consumption are too high, which also cites Second Life and Twitter as potential energy problems. I must admit that energy consumption is not something I often think about when using any of these sites, and even if the article is off in it’s numbers, the issue discussed is still an interesting one to consider.