With a horrific oil leak poisoning the Gulf, energy independence from hydrocarbons has never looked more appealing. Google agrees, and putting their money with their PR is has invested 38.8 million dollars into wind power.
The investment is in North Dakota, which is noted for its steady, strong winds that are well adapted for wind power harvesting. Google says that for clean energy to advance in the world, and especially in the United States three things are required: effective policy, innovative technology and smart capital. Google has both money and influence, so their advocacy into the issue is serious, and carries weight.
Google’s goal with its investment is to “accelerate the deployment of the latest clean energy technology while providing attractive returns to Google.” Hard to complain with that, Google is using their philanthropic division and their bank account to help promote and build the future of clean energy.
The wind farms themselves that Google has invested in include some 113 turbines that can power up to 55,000 houses. While it is a small step, it represents an appetite from Google to speed along the progress of renewable energy.
Google itself is a voracious consumer of power around the world, with its many server farms and large campuses pulling hard on electrical grids in many large countries. That Google would want to invest in ways to generate that power in a better fashion speaks to a culture of corporate environmentalism that is rare.
After the oil leak became a serious problem, and its potential damage became known one smart commentator noted that wind spills tend to have less deleterious impacts on their local environment. If Google follows up this first investment into wind with more in the Dakotas, perhaps they can lead other giant corporations into similar actions and create a serious push by corporate America to change our energy plan.
Hey Google and friends, please just post these numbers, it should convince all about wind power:
1. How much does it cost to setup a wind turbine?
2. How much energy does the wind turbine generate and how many % of that energy can be used by housing or planned electric cars?
3. How much return at current energy costs does that wind turbine generate per year?
4. How many years does it take to pay for the wind turbine selling its energy to the grid at current energy costs?
- Quite simply, if plain mathematics say something like that the Wind Turbines are paid for within 5-10 years, just by selling the generated energy at regular energy prices back to the grid, then it just wouldn’t make any sense not to build and setup as many wind turbines as possible. Off shore wind turbines are probably great investments as well, please provide mathematics on cost vs revenue from off shore wind turbines. Also, please do provide clear mathematics detailing how the use of electric cars to capture wind energy generated at night to charge the batteries of many thousands of new electric cars, how that improves things as well to thus use most of the generated energy even as wind is a varying source of energy.
Also consider the http://betterplace.com model of 2-minute automatic battery exchange stations before criticizing the range of electric car batteries. Also good about Better Place, their model saves $5’000-$10’000 on the purchase of electric cars as consumers would not have to own the battery but would just rent it from Better Place including their cost per mile for charging on clean energy (where Better Place promises not to charge more for the batteries + clean energy charging than current price per mile using gasoline powered cars). Thus under the Better Place model, electric cars could actually soon be sold even cheaper than oil powered cars.