More on Google's Energy Initiative
by Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly Radar
I wanted to add a few more thoughts about Google's new energy initiative, Renewable Energy at Less cost than Coal, or spelled out as an acronym, RELC, an ambitious attempt to fund alternative energy technologies that offer the possibility of generating electricity at a cost less than that of coal.
The stakes are high. If our worst fears about global warming are right, we're going to bring our technological progress to a halt unless we get new sources of clean energy. Google's goal of beating the cost of energy from coal is critical, because coal is the default lowest-cost choice for electricity generation, and the worst from a global warming perspective.
And let's be clear, the internet industry we know and love is a huge consumer of power. I love Nick Carr's estimate from last year that a Second Life avatar consumes almost as much energy as a real human. While Nick's calculations are provocative rather than authoritative, he makes a good point. Our electronic lifestyle has hidden, off-the-books costs. Google is very smart to acknowledge this fact.
But Google's investments in energy aren't just driven by worries about global warming. To be sure, Al Gore is a senior advisor to the company, and the management team takes the threat very seriously. But Google also has a very direct business interest in developing new, cheap sources of energy.
One of the first times I met Larry Page, long before Google went public, when he was still driving a bright blue VW bug, he was telling me how for Google, the annual energy cost of each processor they put online was greater than the cost of the processor itself. (This may actually have been lifetime energy cost. It's a long time and I don't remember exactly, so I don't want to put words in his mouth.) Energy is one of the key costs for anyone running a large server farm, and keeping that cost under control is a key element of competitive advantage.
full article at O'Reilly Radar post on Google's Renewable Energy at Less cost than Coal plan, RELC
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