Google cares about green energy almost as much as search

Google deals with information like a precious currency, and every day it becomes more apparent that its search engine is only one portal for accessing and manipulating that vast resource. Tendrils sprawl out from that portal and quickly spread over a variety of industries and initiatives. Creating the energy to store and liquefy that information so that it flows to countless nodes over the Internet is a big cost for Google, so it has a vested interested in solving the energy scarcity problem.

That’s why the company has created an aggressive plan that will supply around 30% of total energy used in the United States from renewable sources. Given that the nation’s current percentage of energy that’s supplied from renewable sources is 1-2%, how does Google intend to make that happen?

In a nutshell, Google wants to expand future infrastructure almost exclusively in the renewable space. Its plan doesn’t call for a reduction in nuclear energy at all, but to meet future demands in energy, solar and wind power are critical components. In fact, deserts provide an excellent place to collect wind, solar, and geothermal energy because of the wide open spaces. Collecting energy from remote areas means that a robust grid system is necessary to transport it from the collection site to the cities that use it.

And, just like a good manager hand out tasks to a team of qualified people, generating energy from the wind and sun can be a distributed task. Eric Schmidt says:

All solutions ultimately are distributed. One of the errors that we have is that we have a patchwork of economics and incentives that distort what is an obviously correct model, which is distributed power. And you want people to be able to generate and send power back into the grid. In fact, it's becoming possible to have a real business of generating power and sending it to the utilities, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Ironically, Google doesn’t seem to take that distributed approach at all with its search engine indexing. Much of that process is veiled as a corporate secret, but the index is largely maintained by a centralized multiplex of processors and hard drives. Though, the actual information is created in the first place by a distributed set of human brains.

It’s good to know that even if our government doesn’t yet have a strong plan on how to shift the energy infrastructure, that the private sector is taking the lead. As long as Google remains benevolent anyway.