The Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal project will focus initially on advanced solar thermal power, wind power technologies, enhanced geothermal systems and other potential breakthrough technologies
The company will spend “tens of millions” on R&D for the project in 2008. As part of its capital planning process, the company also anticipates investing hundreds of millions of dollars in breakthrough renewable energy projects which generate positive returns.
“We have gained expertise in designing and building large-scale, energy-intensive facilities by building efficient data centers,” said Google co-founder and president Larry Page. “We want to apply the same creativity and innovation to the challenge of generating renewable electricity at globally significant scale, and produce it cheaper than from coal.”
“With talented technologists, great partners and significant investments, we hope to rapidly push forward. Our goal is to produce one Gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that is cheaper than coal. We are optimistic this can be done in years, not decades,” Mr Page said.
One Gigawatt can power a city the size of San Francisco.
“If we meet this goal and large-scale renewable deployments are cheaper than coal, the world will have the option to meet a substantial portion of electricity needs from renewable sources and significantly reduce carbon emissions. We expect this would be a good business for us as well.”
Coal is the primary power source for many around the world, supplying 40 per cent of the world's electricity.
“Lots of groups are doing great work trying to produce inexpensive renewable energy. We want to add something that moves these efforts toward even cheaper technologies a bit more quickly. Usual investment criteria may not deliver the super low-cost, clean, renewable energy soon enough to avoid the worst effects of climate change,” said Dr Larry Brilliant, the executive director of Google's philanthropic arm, Google.org.
“Google.org's hope is that by funding research on promising technologies, investing in promising new companies, and doing a lot of R&D ourselves, we may help spark a green electricity revolution that will deliver breakthrough technologies priced lower than coal.”
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