Geothermal energy

Google, brainpower and Jevons paradox

June 16, 2009

Today I’ve been blogging for Greenbiz.com from the 20th annual Energy Efficiency Forum in Washington, D.C., a day-long event sponsored by Johnson Controls and the United States Energy Association. Here are some highlights:

Google: making consumers smarter about energy

Imagine if you walked into a grocery store, chose the food you want (no price tags), took it home and then, at the end of the month, got the bill in the mail. “That’s essentially what we are doing with electricity and natural gas right now,” says Dan Reicher, who heads energy and climate policy at Google, which is aiming to change that.

Instead giving energy consumers a monthly bill that arrives after the fact and is hard for even a geek to decipher, Google wants to give them a way to track their electricity use in real time, or close to, through a free, open-protocol piece of software called Google’s Power Meter. The Power Meter being rolled out in cooperation with eight utility companies, six in the U.S., one in Canada and one in India; they feed the software data through smart meters or other devices.

“Just the simple act of getting people information can really change the way they use energy,” Reicher says. The software tracks electricity use for now, but there’s no reason it can’t be adapted to meter natural gas or water in the future. The software can be installed on a Google home page (alongside stock prices or sports scores) or on a mobile device. “You get data, numbers, graphics, all kinds of interesting things,” Reicher said.

Making consumers smarter about energy will change habits, especially when combined with time-of-day pricing. If utilities can induce people to use less electricity during summer days when it is expensive and more during off peak hours, they won’t have to build as many new power plants to meet peak loads and everyone will save money.

Google employees have been testing the Power Meter for some time, with amusing results. One tenant in a San Francisco apartment saw unusual spikes in his usage and learned that he was paying for the washer and dryer for his entire building. Another found that her her swimming pool pump never turned off. A third replaced old refrigerators in the kitchen and garage and cut his utility bill by 45%.

The scope of Google’s work around energy and climate is quite remarkable. (Reicher, who’s been to FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green, is a typically smart Google exec, a former energy investor and a policymaker during the Clinton administration.) Google is investing in geothermal energy, doing its own research on solar thermal power, pushing hard for plug-in hybrids and “greening” its data centers. I’m hoping to dig deeper into Google’s energy initiatives in a future post.
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When GE meets Google

September 27, 2008

Because many of us are captivated by the extraordinary goings-on in Washington, on Wall Street and in the presidential campaign, it’s easy to overlook everything else that’s happening in the world of business. But an unusual bi-coastal alliance between GE and Google caught my attention last week, and so it is the topic of my latest Sustainability column at fortune.com and cnnmoney.com.

GE and Google don’t have a lot in common, but the industrial giant and the Internet powerhouse share an interest in renewable energy. So they have come together to lobby for a so-called smart electricity grid and to collaborate, albeit in an unspecified way, in research into geothermal energy.

Here’s how the column begins:

When companies as savvy and as important as General Electric and Google join forces, it’s worth a closer look. The companies say they will work together to drive two industries with big growth potential: geothermal energy and the upgrading of the nation’s overburdened electricity grid.

The two industries are related, of course. Renewable energy, whether from wind, the sun or geothermal, which taps into the heat below the surface of the earth, won’t be deployed on a vast scale until the electricity grid can carry more power and deliver it more intelligently.

A more robust grid, often called a smart grid, would be able to move electricity in both directions (not just from central power plants to users), monitor usage better, enable more sophisticated pricing schemes and use advanced sensors to pinpoint outages.

“The smart grid is all about marrying energy technology and information technology,” said Bob Gilligan, a vice president for transmission and distribution at GE Energy, during a conference called Smart Grid this week in Washington, D.C. Without a stronger and smarter grid, the so-called clean tech revolution will come to a grinding halt.

Upgrading the grid will likely be a slog. Two famously sluggish bodies–the federal goverment and the utility industry–basically run the grid. But the geothermal play is intriguing. The potential for geothermal energy, which often gets overshadowed by solar and wind, is huge. If you want to know more, this Google website and YouTube video are worth a look.

You can read the rest of the column here.

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