Google Goes Green 374
foobsr writes "Google today announced its RE<C project to make renewable energy cheaper than coal in the near future. The company, and its charitable arm google.org, plan to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the initiative. Larry Page stated: '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.'"
Vested interest (Score:4, Interesting)
Has Bill Gates or Steve Jobs made any similar pledges?
Re:Great scott! (Score:5, Interesting)
Therefore, anyone wishing to create renewable energy more cost effective than coal doesn't need to do anything beyond keep trying and not get worse, and they will get there eventually.
As far as technical challenges go, this is right up there with "hitting the ground".
Re:Go Google (Score:4, Interesting)
Well it makes Hummer owners look down right green.
I guess the non billionaires need to save energy.
Re:Nuk-u-lar (Score:5, Interesting)
First issue is that there is plenty of uranium on this planet to power the world using current tech for a long time. The reason is that even in the oceans there is uranium.
Bear in mind, that with current approaches to reactors, we use about 2% of the power, and then we waste the rest (which is the reason why it takes 10's of thousands of years to cool down). OTH, if you use a breeder reactor, and keep the cycle going, then you use up about 98-99% of the energy (leaving a small residual that is cool within 150 years). In fact, here in America, if we could switch ALL power to IFR (integral fast reactors), AND had electric cars, AND kept everything inefficient, we would have enough uranium/plutonium in waste that we would not need to dig or buy anything for the next 100 years.
Estimates are that there is about 10000 years of Uranium if it supplies ALL of the worlds energy needs. After that is burned there is thorium, or h2-3. Point being that nukes will last quit a long time.
Re:why name Gates and Jobs? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's simply not true, and renewable resources (plants, trees, etc.) are evidence of that. We are not a zero sum game because we have, for all intents and purposes, an inexhaustible supply of energy from the sun. Think back through the chain --> sun causes plants to grow, animals eat plants, etc. We're all solar powered, ultimately.
More efficient exploitation of that energy results in an increase in available resources. Sure, there's a limit, but we have even begun to tap into it, even with existing technology.
That's why projects like Google's are important. Any increase in efficient production of renewable energy ensures that we continue to not be a zero sum game.
There may come a point where no further technological innovation is possible, but it looks like when we get to that advanced state that the population will contract voluntarily. Witness the below-replacement birth rates in first world countries.
Re:Go Google (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hmmmm (Score:2, Interesting)
Interesting that they're now announcing that they're entering this space.
Good luck (Score:4, Interesting)
No disrespect to Google, and I'm glad they're making the investment, but they (and a lot of the commenters here) seem to think all it requires is waving their Magic Googlewand(beta) and we'll have energy cheaper than coal(!! Coal is pretty freaking cheap).
If it were easy, it'd have been done already. For Google to claim that they think it can be done in "years, not decades" sounds like a good bit of hubris. If they don't have something already on the horizon, then we're stepping in the range of arrogant stupidity.
All the credit to Google for stepping up to the plate and trying to get something done, but the way the whole thing is worded, there's this undercurrent of assumption that nobody has tried to make these things work before. All inventors think about cheap energy! It's like Google slapped their head one day and said, "Good God! Why didn't anyone think of creating alternate energy cheaper than coal before?? We're geniuses!!"
I hope something comes of it, but I'm not holding my breath.
please stop with the Ocean Uranium Crap (Score:2, Interesting)
OK - fine. How many parts per million of uranium is there in sea water, eh? Now, take the number of parts of Uranium you will need to run a reactor. Multiple those two numbers, and you will get the volume of water you will need to boil off to get the uranium you need for ONE reactor. Now, take that number and multiply it by the thousands and you will see that the the "Uranium from the Ocean" meme is just a load of impractical bullshit that just makes the pronuclear side come off like a bunch of stupid moonbats. You'd have to process the volume of water the Rhine dumps in a year to get the Uranium for one reactor. Where will all that water vapour go? In the air? And the left over salts? Hmmm? Billions of tons of sea salts, some of it rather toxic? And the results of dumping that much water vapour in the air? Think about that much?
I DO agree that nuclear power should be (actually MUST be) pursued and with great alacrity and precision. I would love to see a plethora of IFR reactors spread all over the place, if we could figure out a way to make thousands of gallons of liquid sodium safe... But please Please PLEASE quit with the "Uranium from Salt Water" crap. It's REALLY embarrassing. With the depletion of petroleum on the imminent horzon, industrial civilisation is going to have a hard enough time survivng the 21st century. We need concrete solutions NOW. I agree that breeders can help, especially in areas that are cold or don't get much sun (like Canada and Russia and the soon to be livable Antarctic) but they will be part and ONLY a part of a more conprehensive energy solution that includes Wind, Solar PV, Thermal Solar, Tides, geothermal, and Hydro.
All of those need to be built up and built up NOW. For the $500B the USA has pissed away in Iraq (and for the $2T it will likely spend there) the USA could have solarised and insulated huge swathes of its urban infrastructure. Instead, they went to go steal oil to drive their Escalades back and forth between their McMansions, WalMart, Work, Church, and School. Brilliant move, tards. Iraq has 112B bbls of oil. If it follows standard extraction trends, and given the competition for it, (i.e., a big chunk of it will go to Europe, Japan, and China) the USA will be LUCKY to get 25% of that oil shipped to the USA. Divide that into the $2T they'll likely spend ruining Iraq, and you're looking at about $97 a barrel surcharge to the American economy for every fucking barrel of Iraqi crude. Good move, Ace.
For the $500B the USA pissed away and the $2T it is likely to piss away, the USA could have funded the plans to build turnkey breeder reactors that run on fucking THORIUM which is an order of magnitude more common than Uranium. But, no. God ferbid the USA ever spend money where it's really needed. If you take $2T and divide it up to every man woman and child in the USA, you get about $6700. A family of 4 would come out to about $26,800 which would be enough to put a pile of PV on the roof of their house in a grid tie to power themselves and much of society with solar power. But, no - it's more important to spend it on destroying Iraq so we can drive our SUVs, and leave the incandescent lights on, and eat salads i nFebruary that were grown in Mexico or Bolivia, and wear clothing made by slave labour in China, and live in houses made out of chipboard, and fly off to winter vacations in ecological nightmares like Las Vegas.
So, yes, we need breeder reactors, desperately. We don't need Las Vegas. We don't need Phoenix. We don't need LA or Bakersfield. And we don't need to hold on to that embarrassing meme about Uranium in sea water.
RS
Re:Go Google (Score:3, Interesting)
Precisely. Guilt is a very inefficient way to control CO2 pollution, and I refuse to use morality as a tool for resource management.
We need an actual carbon tax/cap and trade scheme(I'm leaning toward the latter). And until we do, every voluntary effort will be nothing but self-righteous bullshit.
Why? Because unless carbon is priced, life-cycle analysis is extremely difficult, counter-intuitive, and error prone. Decisions are made based intuition, and this can backfire. For example, many well meaning people only buy locally produced organic food, because they believe that the increased proximity to their food will decrease on transportation related CO2 emissions. But the world is not so simple, it turns out that trucks produce far more CO2 per ton of produce transported, and that it is drastically more efficient, from an emissions point of view, to ship food in from the other side of the world. There might be other reasons to like local food, but CO2 does not factor into it.
In a similar fashion, you cannot critique Google's CEOs unless you institute either a full-life cycle study, or a carbon pricing scheme. If they did not buy the 767, it would almost certainly have been snapped by an airline, which would have used it far more often then then it is right now. Perhaps the most environmentally efficient way to prevent CO2 emissions is to buy Jumbo-Jets and under-utilize them.
This might not be true, but in the absence of a carbon pricing system, neither of us really know. So until such a system is in place, stop intruding into others personal business.
Re:Another take on Peak Oil (Score:2, Interesting)
Like a bat out of hell. (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you heard it burn rubber when the stoplight goes green? Electric motors like the Prius uses are amazing at producing off-the-line torque. Combine that with its low weight, and you find that the Prius actually out-accelerates most cars on the road.
As an environmental move, whether hybrid drivetrains represent a net win is a little ambiguous (until we get plug-in hybrids). But for performance, they have a lot of pretty exciting advantages.
I was on a University team which built a hybrid formula-style racecar. That thing blew the pants off of Ferraris. In fact, it was originally entered for the general Formula SAE event, which then outlawed hybrids as having an unfair advantage. (So we started another competition just for hybrid vehicles.)
Want to see what electric motors can do? Check out the Tesla Roadster [teslamotors.com]. And it only uses an AC induction motor (hence "Tesla")!!
(The fact that it "only" uses an induction motor is important because induction motors, though cheap and durable, are not even the money-no-object "best" option: That would be a permanent magnet synchronous DC motor.)
The downside to electric drivetrains is that they have more components, and electric motors are heavy, so their more impressive torque needs to make up for the increased weight. But the fact is that, currently, hybrids do exactly that, and, as motors get lighter, the advantages will only get more and more pronounced.
Have you heard the quiet, confident, high-tech sound of a really powerful electric motor spooling up? It's truly a beautiful sound.
Re:Another take on Peak Oil (Score:3, Interesting)
Not a very good analogy. We've moved from energy source to energy source in the past, not because we needed to, but because something better sort of fell in our lap. Today we're looking at a scenario where we need to move past biological fuels to survive as a society and possibly as a species, but there's not anything better staring us in the face.
Seriously. Until oil, we'd never used a fossil fuel. Our only sources of energy were BIOLOGICAL. Wood/etc for burning. Whale Oil. Muscle power. That was it. And no, oil didn't just fall in somebodies lap as an energy source. It was required because there REALLY WAS a crisis brewing around the virtual extinction of sperm whales.
And even more funny, whatever energy is predominant 100 years from now probably IS staring us in the face today. It's just going to take some innovation to get us there.
Re:Another take on Peak Oil (Score:3, Interesting)
Humans have been using coal for heat and cooking for thousands of years.