Google, the Internet giant that set out to slay the fossil fuel dragon a few years ago, with seven energy and environmental projects, has thrown in the towel on its energy projects, including the aptly named 'Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal' project.
Google to Continue Clean Energy Projects
Project results to date will be published to help others advance power tower technology, and Google will continue other clean energy and efficiency efforts, including renewable energy procurement, data center efficiency projects with over $850 million the company invested in renewable energy technologies.
Reuters said Google has been doing research to drive down the cost of renewable energy since 2007. Two years ago, Google’s then-green energy czar, Bill Weihl, predicted that the company would only take a few years to develop renewable technology that could produce electricity more cheaply than coal. Wiehl moved out of this position less than a month ago, probably because the objectives had not been reached.
PowerMeter, a tool for monitoring energy usage, which Google had been working on, also got the chop, in the third round of spring cleaning since Google co-founder Larry Page took over in April. Apparently, according to a Google spokesperson, "PowerMeter didn’t catch on the way we would have hoped.”
Among the projects that were cancelled was one called 'REGeothermal Map of the US' which was designed to help understand the potential for geothermal energy to provide renewable power that is always available. As well, there was an engineering team working to improve a type of concentrating solar power technology called the 'solar power tower,' an innovative technology that works by using a field of mirrors, called heliostats, to concentrate the sun’s rays onto a solar receiver on top of a tower.
Electricity iis generated from the sun’s concentrated heat, and the concept has been successfully demonstrated in the U.S. and abroad on a small scale. Google invested $168M in the world’s largest power tower project under construction -- Brightsource’s Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS). The project is set to be completed in 2013, when it will generate 392 MW of clean solar energy.
Progress in Clean Energy
There has been a lot of progress in clean energy over the last few years, and some technologies are becoming cost competitive with traditional forms of energy in some parts of the U.S. and the world. Power tower technology has come a long way, too, yet the installed cost of solar photovoltaic technology has declined dramatically over the past few years, making this technology a more desirable choice for consumers over other forms of solar power..
Further, Google believes its solar power engineering projects had reached a point where new challenges related to solar receiver design were presented. Other organizations were considered to be in a better position to take this work to the next level, hence the company's decision to retire the engineering work on renewables.
Key Findings in Power Tower Technology
Some of the results which Google will publish on power tower, include some innovative apporaches to producing solar power, such as:
- Using smarter controls: Stronger heliostat structures using lower cost materials andssmarter software controls can generate better performance at a lower cost.
- Using the Brayton engine: This is a jet engine that uses solar energy to heat air and does not require spray cooling with water, which may reduce water use as well as operating costs.
- Taking the systems approach: Rather than attempting to optimize each individual solar component, Google took a system level approach to designing concentrating solar systems, in the belief that this approach could reduce the cost of electricity generated by concentrating solar systems.
Duane Sharp - I am a retired professional engineer (electronics), with over 40 years of writing experience in technology topics, with a focus on the IT ...
