Google puts $10 mln into new geothermal technology

LOS ANGELES, Aug 19 (Reuters) - Google Inc (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) is investing $10 million to produce electricity from underground heat with a breakthrough technology, as the Web search leader extends its clout to clean up the environment.

The move is part of Google's effort to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into green energy sources, starting with solar thermal, high-altitude wind power and now, geothermal energy.

Heat from below the earth's surface could one day be a massive contributor to the nation's electricity supplies because it is available around the clock, Google said.

"It's 24-7, it's potentially developable all over the country, all over the world, and for all that we really do think it could be the 'killer app' of the energy world," Dan Reicher, Google's head of climate and energy initiatives, said in an interview. "Killer app" is a term used to describe revolutionary software.

That new "app," called enhanced geothermal systems, or EGS, improves upon the century-old technology of tapping geothermal energy from geysers, hot springs or volcanoes to generate electricity. With EGS, engineers drill their own geothermal outlets and pump in water to create steam to power a turbine.

The bulk of Google's first geothermal investment, $6.25 million, will help finance EGS company AltaRock Energy Inc of Sausalito, California. Other investors in the company include some of the top Silicon Valley venture capital firms.

About $4 million of Google's money will go to Potter Drilling Inc, a Redwood City, California company which has a hard rock drilling technology.

Enhanced geothermal systems that AltaRock is developing can work in a wider range of geographies than conventional geothermal ones, Google said.

"If you drill deep enough anywhere you can get to hot rock," Reicher said.

The key to keeping the cost of a project down, therefore, is to find hot rocks that lie close to the surface. Nevada has good geothermal resources, Reicher said, as do some Eastern states including West Virginia and Pennsylvania.

To help locate good geothermal resources, Google also announced a $489,521 grant for Southern Methodist University's Geothermal Lab to update geothermal mapping of North America.

Google is part of a $26.25 million round of funding AltaRock announced on Tuesday. Other investors include Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) co-founder Paul Allen's investment firm, Vulcan Capital, and Silicon Valley venture capital firms Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Advanced Technology Ventures.

Google's previous clean technology investments include $20 million for two solar thermal companies -- eSolar Inc and BrightSource Energy Inc, and $10 million to high-altitude wind company Makani Power Inec. (Editing by Gerald E. McCormick, Steve Orlofsky, Richard Chang)

Here comes the sun

Posted: June 23, 2008, 9:15 PM by Chris Boutet

Nanosolar’s breakthrough technology is 10 times more powerful than a nuclear reactor and cheaper, too

By Lawrence Solomon

Go to YouTube and you can see a corporate video of a printing press running at 100 feet per minute, applying a nanoparticle ink to foil and producing solar cells. This machine is owned by Nanosolar Inc., which in turn is partly owned by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google. This one printing machine, Nanosolar claims, can produce solar cells with a capacity of 1,000 MW per year, the equivalent of a nuclear reactat Indian Point outside Manhattan or two nuclear reactors at Pickering outside Toronto.

Unlike nuclear reactors, which take a decade to build and billions of dollars in capital costs before delivering a single kilowatt-hour to a home or business, Nanosolar’s breakthrough technology can help meet society’s power needs soon after its ink has dried, and the press’s capital costs amount to a mere $1.65-million. Put another way, we can wait 10 years to get nuclear power up and running. Or, by relying on a single Nanosolar press, we can have the solar equivalent of a major nuclear plant in one year, and the equivalent of 10 major plants in a decade. Soon, says Nanosolar, its printing presses will be operating much faster — perhaps 20 times faster. Should this prove feasible, a single Nanosolar press would pump out in a single decade the equivalent of 200 nuclear plants — far more than now exist in all of North America.

To add to the slam-dunk superiority of Nanosolar-type technology over nuclear, solar cells produce power when we especially need it — when people are awake and industries are humming. During the low-value off-peak hours when power is in great surplus, the solar cells sleep, too. Nuclear reactors, by contrast, can’t ratchet down or turn off when their output isn’t needed. Off-peak nuclear power, in fact, is sometimes produced at a loss because its operating costs exceeds the pittance earned at, say, 3 a.m.

To get bang for the buck, and obtain the power that a growing economy needs, nuclear and solar are as different as night and day. Nuclear power, a half-century after the launch of the first generation of nuclear reactors, remains an immature technology, each successive generation proving to be not only unreliable but also subject to ever-higher costs. Solar technology, in contrast, becomes ever more reliable and ever less costly, and is only immature in the same way that computer technology is immature — there is no end in sight yet to how far and fast it can go.

Nanosolar, founded in 2002 by two Stanford PhD candidates applying Silicon Valley smarts, is a case in point. By the end of 2003, it had obtained 60 patents, By 2004, it had developed its printing method. By 2006, it had published its results in a peer-reviewed journal and, within months, raised $100-million. By the end of 2007 it had made its first commercial shipment. Now Nanosolar can’t keep up with the demand — its factory’s output for the next 12-months is pre-sold.

Nanosolar’s solar panels could go on rooftops but the company recommends against this — at least until building codes become flexible enough to accommodate panels without the need to battle municipal bureaucracies. Besides, it says, it is developing a residential product sure to wow the homeowner.

In the meantime, it touts small municipal solar power plants that can be up and running in one year on the outskirts of cities and towns, where land is readily available. Each would be between 2 MW and 10 MW in size — enough to power 1,000 to 5,000 homes. Put one of these in several hundred cities and a nuclear plant’s worth of power would be delivered, locally and in a decentralized manner, and without the expensive and unsightly transmission towers that accompany large nuclear plants.

As impressive as Nanosolar is, here’s something more impressive still: This company is but one of several with solar breakthroughs that stand to revolutionize the energy world. Some of the competing solar technologies are designed for large-scale applications, some small. In this dynamic new energy marketplace, some will prosper and, doubtless, some will fail, just as many of the computer pioneers in the 1970s and 1980s failed for one reason or another. But large or small, well capitalized or not, the solar technologies are working more impressively than anyone could have dreamed a decade ago and seem certain to overtake nuclear as a provider of additional power to our electricity systems. If the projections from Nanosolar and others prove accurate, in fact, they will become the most economic power source of all, besting even coal.

Clean, limitless power is now within grasp, courtesy of those who have reached for the sun.

Financial Post
LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers. This is the first in a series on renewable energy.

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Google and Ormat discussing geothermal energy projects

18/05/2008

Ormat is one of the companies Google is talking to about alternative energy, co-founder Sergey Brin told TheMarker in an interview over the weekend.

Brin, 34, was in Israel for President Shimon Peres' presidential conference "Facing Tomorrow," and visited Google's Israeli offices as well.

Brin, who called Ormat an incredible company, said there were a lot of interesting Israeli companies that worked in renewable and alternative energy, as well as electric cars.
He refused to say if Google was on the verge of closing any deals to purchase Israeli companies, but did say the conditions were very good for Google to buy Israeli firms in the next year.

Senior Google executives met with their counterparts from Ormat at two alternative energy conferences, including a presentation on geothermal energy. Larry Page, the other co-founder of Google, even visited an Ormat geothermal plant in Desert Peak, Nevada.

Ormat is considered the world leader in geothermal energy.

The relations between the two firms started after Google announced its strategic RE

The goal of the initiative is to develop electricity from renewable energy sources that will be cheaper than electricity produced from coal.

Google's program initially will focus on advanced solar thermal power, wind power technologies, enhanced geothermal systems and other potential breakthrough technologies.

Page said, "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."

One gigawatt can power a city the size of San Francisco.

Google operates in the alternative energy field through its philanthropic arm, Google.org. Google's headquarters has solar panels that generate 1.6 megawatts.

Ormat chairman Lucien Bronicki said in response that the meetings with Google are being held on a professional basis in order to advance geothermal technology. The firms are working to advance legislation for advanced geothermal technology development budgets from the U.S. government.

In February, Ormat announced a test of what is know as Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) technology, to be done in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Energy.

The plan is to increase the output of one of Ormat's geothermal wells with the new technology by turning marginal wells into profitable ones.

Brin also praised Google Israel's contributions to the parent company, mentioning applications such as Google Trends and Google Suggest, among dozens of others built in Israel.

As to local sales, he refused to give numbers, but did say they were going very well, and that Internet advertising in Israel works amazingly well.

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Google and IBM are bonding in a serious way

PC era fading, cloud computing rising -- watch out, Microsoft?

By Patrick Thibodeau

May 2, 2008 (Computerworld) Los Angeles -- While Microsoft chases Yahoo, Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO and chairman is seeking a stronger relationship with IBM, something in which Big Blue's chairman and CEO, Sam Palmisano, appears very interested.

Schmidt, who spoke at the IBM's PartnerWorld conference, later shared the stage at the Nokia Theater here with Palmisano, to discuss cloud computing, globalization and other issues.

The two CEOs bantered like old golf buddies, praising each other's organizations and rarely giving moderator Pankaj Ghemawat, a professor of global strategy at the IESE Business School in Barcelona, a chance to ask questions.

Google and IBM collaborated last year on a compute cloud-type system -- a platform for delivering scalable IT capabilities as a service -- and then turned it over for universities to use. It was a pilot project, but it was clear from today that the two firms will be doing more.

Google wants enterprise customers for its applications, which are delivered as services via compute clouds. What it needs to help make that happen is IBM.

In response to a question about IBM from this reporter after his talk, Schmidt said IBM is one of the "key planks of the strategy" for reaching enterprise customers. "Customers like to buy from strong sales forces that provide real quality service, and IBM is the best at that," he said.

For his part, Palmisano offered a Google-like view of the universe when told his business partner audience that the "PC is receding in influence," and is being replaced by network infrastructures.

To that point, IBM this week said it will offer an iTunes-like application delivery model for small and mid-sized businesses. Its Blue Business Platform will deliver complete and integrated software from either IBM or participating independent software vendors.

Its "Global Application Marketplace" will include applications and services, delivered via an online catalog directly to a user's server, as well as Web 2.0-like peer ratings of the products. IBM officials see it as a direct challenge to Microsoft in that market.

And there may be other, less tangible benefits to Google-IBM cooperation.

Frank Gens, an IDC analyst, said the two firms likely want to pool engineering talent on developing a cloud computing platform, as well as putting both their brands behind it. And combining Google's "cool" with IBM's enterprise credibility could boost acceptance of the cloud business platform.

Today, IBM is developing Blue Cloud, a system that will enable enterprises to build cloud-type system as a means to deliver services via a cloud internally, or to external users. It's due to release details of the system in the next month or two.

Palmisano said he believes he and Schmidt share a common view of the future, which includes commitment to standards and open architectures.

IBM and Google, said Schmidt are similar in many respects, with "engineering-oriented cultures" and support for collaboration.

Palmisano said maintaining a strong research and development effort is critical for IBM, otherwise his "scientists would leave -- they would go to Google."

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