Google Leads the Way, Again

 Last week Google announced that the company, and its philanthropic subsidiary, Google.org, would explore research and develop renewable energy.  The goal is to ultimately produce one gigawatt of renewable energy and do so more cheaply that coal-generated electricity, which of course creates vast amounts of CO2.  I was thrilled to read the news reports of this announcement.

As someone who thinks about the future, converting global society to alternative and renewable types of energy and away from fossil fuels is perhaps the top challenge humanity faces.  The way this will get done is through creativity, innovation, technological breakthroughs and non-attachment to existing status quos. Sounds like something that Google is well prepared to do.  (Regular readers know that I have admired Google in the past; click on ‘Google’ in the archives at right).

Of course the traditional reaction to this announcement, mostly from those supposedly insightful “Wall Street Analysts” was to suggest the company was risking corporate focus on its’ core businesses.  Nonsense!  It was these types of conventional pundits that, a century ago suggested that the railroad companies were in the railroad and not transportation businesses.  Flying people in airplanes, nah, you guys are in the train business.  Using all your right of way real estate for development?  Nah, stick to the train business.

As readers of this column know, I have often suggested that the renewable energy marketplace presents the greatest wealth creation opportunity in humanity’s history.  Great fortunes are about to be made.  Think of the wealth that John D. Rockefeller created that has existed for generations.  When he started out the user base for oil was in the hundreds of thousands.  The user base for alternative energy right now is in the billions of people. The wealth created around alternative energy in the next 20-30 years will equal and probably dwarf the wealth created around computers.  It is the hugest financial opportunity in the world today.

Google is a company populated by thousands of very smart people, many of them engineers, all of whom work in a culture that values innovation and new ideas.  What better place to work on the urgent problem of renewable energy.  We cannot leave this issue with the traditional power and drilling companies because they are stuck in their own paradigms.  It is outside the box thinkers that will come up with the radical, transformative ideas.  Who would have thought that the bicycle repair shop owned by the Wright brothers would be the place where manned flight would be birthed?

The companies and individuals that develop the breakthroughs that save us from our deathly addiction to fossil fuels will be heroes.  In addition, they will be wealthy.  Why would any company that has the resources and also the brainpower not want to give it a try?

In speeches I give, I suggest that, in the last two decades, Western science has proven the validity of Eastern religion which is that everything is energy.  If everything is energy, why linger in this small, non-renewable part of energy called fossil fuels?  It is clear the energy sources we will be using in the decades ahead: terrestrial solar, space solar power, wind, wave, biomass, nuclear, and ultimately perhaps cold fusion.  What needs to be developed are the power conversion, storage and transmission technologies that will harness all these sources of power.  That will ultimately drive down the costs relative to fossil fuels.

The equation that Google is using is to create renewable energy that costs less than coal.  That will be easier to achieve than most pundits suggest.  In the 1860s, when oil was first discovered it was, in 2006 dollars, as expensive as it is today.  It was much more expensive as an energy source than wood or coal.  The price rapidly dropped in the following decades because of scale of production and delivery which then created market scale, which then drove down the costs even further. So when people talk about the relative expensive costs of wind and solar energy, they need to be told that oil was much more expensive than the energy sources that were used at that time.  Innovation, new technologies and market scale is the path.  Google seems to have shown they can do these very well.

Wouldn’t it be funny, if in 2015, the comment about Google was “Remember when search was their largest business?”               

         

    

  

 

 

 

 

7 Responses to “Google Leads the Way, Again”

  1. J. Says:

    Great post. Interesting pov re: what is a company’s core -which is something that business owners are faced with daily. The counter balance of core vs new potential business is the line straddled often – the key is creating a culture of thinking that is under the umbrella of the company with good business discipline applied to new lines of business.

  2. Jed Rothwell Says:

    You mentioned cold fusion, and you wrote:

    “What needs to be developed are the power conversion, storage and transmission technologies that will harness all these sources of power.”

    Cold fusion does not require any storage or transmission. It produces mainly heat, which can easily be converted into other forms of energy in situ.

    Arthur C. Clarke wrote a lot about cold fusion in the revised version of “Profiles of the Future” Clarke and several distinguished professors endorsed my e-book “Cold Fusion and the Future” which discusses these engineering issues in some detail. See:

    http://lenr-canr.org/BookBlurb.htm

    At present, cold fusion cannot be scaled up or made into a commercial source of energy because it cannot be controlled. It isn’t safe; cells sometimes go out of control and explode. However, in the last 8 months excellent progress has been made with the so-called “lukewarm fusion” plasma reaction and it can now be controlled perfectly. Cold fusion achieved the temperatures and power density of nuclear fission reactor cores by 1992, so scaling up should not be a problem, once control is established. Energy density is millions of times higher than any chemical reaction.

    Despite what you read in the newspapers and the Scientific American, cold fusion was replicated by hundreds of world class laboratories, and thousands of papers about it were published. You can read a large selection of them at our website:

    http://lenr-canr.org

    – Jed Rothwell
    Librarian, LENR-CANR.org

  3. gregory Says:

    jed, am interested in your last paragraph… this part .. “Despite what you read in the newspapers and the Scientific American… ” could you be suggesting these publications have distorted facts? what might be their agenda, please…

    nice post, good response from mr. rockwell…

    it is a given that energy sources will change, watching the movie unfold is very interesting

  4. david Says:

    Jed and Gregory –
    You both should read the interviews archived to the right under “Scientists – Interviews” particularly this one http://www.evolutionshift.com/blog/2007/06/28/leading-scientists-and-thinkers-on-energy-fabrizio-pinto/ as Fabrizio is at the forefront of ZPG and cold fusion. Also the interview with Tom Valone who has also published a book on Cold Fusion.

  5. Jed Rothwell Says:

    Gregory wrote:

    “jed, am interested in your last paragraph… this part .. ‘Despite what you read in the newspapers and the Scientific American…’ could you be suggesting these publications have distorted facts? what might be their agenda, please…”

    Ah, I can give you that information right from the horse’s mouth. The past and present editors of the Scientific American wrote several letters to me explaining why they oppose cold fusion. I uploaded their messages to LENR-CANR. Click on the link at the bottom of the main page, where it says “Appeal to readers.”

    Another link to that document can be found in a section where we quote extensively from one of the Scientific American attacks:

    http://lenr-canr.org/News.htm#SciAmSlam

    To summarize, the editors say they have not read any papers on cold fusion because that is “not their job.” They admit they know nothing at all about the research. (Actually, they brag about that.) But they are certain a priori that cold fusion is a mistake.

    David mentioned that he interviewed Fabrizio and Valone. I have no knowledge of ZPE, so I cannot comment on or judge these claims.

    – Jed Rothwell

  6. gregory Says:

    thanks jed and david for the replies and links

  7. gregory Says:

    just found this at http://www.techcrunch.com, Future Scanner: A Digg Clone That Tracks The Future .. and the site is http://memebox.com/futurescanner