Green

Google’s Green Efforts Increasingly Homegrown

Internet search engine giant Google, has taken on the challenge to be greener and has started developing their own green technology. The reason behind this move is because Google could not find sufficient investment opportunities to achieve their goal of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a technology to find a renewable energy source for electricity that is cheaper than coal. Therefore rather than waiting for better ideas to come along, the company has decided to find its own solutions such as better mirrors for solar thermal plants and solar powered turbines for generating electricity.

One of the major breakthroughs is that Google engineers have found a way to reduce the cost of heliostats, the mirrors used in solar thermal plants by making the mirrors and their mounts using unusual materials. “Typically, what we’re seeing is $2.50 to $4 a watt capital cost. So a 250-megawatt installation would be $600 million to a $1 billion,” said Bill Weihl, Google’s Green Energy Czar. “It’s a lot of money.” He also went on to state that the turbines that Google’s engineers are modifying are actually gas turbines that are being engineered to run on solar power instead of natural gas.