Google Takes Aim At Renewable Energy

Google?s founder and CEO, Larry Page, has announced that the company has tasked an R&D team with making renewable energy cheaper than fossil fuels.

At the company?s annual shareholder meeting, Page announced that a team would be created to capitalize on the company?s investments in green energy companies and its own intellectual property. To fill it, Google is recruiting five new positions in its Renewable Energy Engineering department, residing at its headquarters in California.

One will be responsible for keeping tabs on Google?s own energy usage, but the others are about developing new renewable technology and recommending investments for the company to make. In all the job ads is the phrase ?utility-scale,? and in an ad for a mechanical engineer, the following sentence appears: ?You will not be designing laboratory experiments; you will be designing useful systems that must deliver cost-effective results in the real world.?

The eventual goal is Google?s long-standing ?RE<C? project, making renewable energy cheaper to produce than energy generated by coal plants. Most researchers agree that it is this crucial tipping point that will be required to keep humanity?s emissions problem under control and limit the damage that?s expected to be caused by climate change.

What?s clear from Page?s statements and the newly-created team is that the company is starting to ramp up its ambitions in this area, pushing forward the timeframe from some nebulous future to ?within a few years.?

Not just for the good of mankind, either. By developing or investing in the technology that makes that goal achievable, Google gets in at the ground level of an industry that?s likely to generate significant revenue in the coming decades. That whole good of mankind thing? It?s just a welcome bonus.

London-based journalist, specializing in digital music, consumer technology, and videogames. Senior Staff Writer at Wired.co.uk
Follow @DuncanGeere on Twitter.

Source: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/06/google-takes-aim-at-renewable-energy/

gran torino tennis arcade fire brother red faction what is my ip address nissan gtr