Google went on a late-season spring cleaning binge—documented
here—curtailing a bunch of programs that “haven’t had the impact we’d hoped for,” such as Googl Gears, Google Friend Connect, and Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (RE<C). Said Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow, in the blog post announcing the spring cleaning:
This initiative was developed as an effort to drive down the cost of renewable energy, with an RE<C engineering team focused on researching improvements to solar power technology. At this point, other institutions are better positioned than Google to take this research to the next level. So we’ve published our results to help others in the field continue to advance the state of power tower technology, and we’ve closed our efforts.
Reuters adds that Google’s Green Energy Czar, Bill Weihl, who had been spearheading the project, had left the company earlier this month.
On the plus side, Google isn’t going a never-green route:
We will continue our work to generate cleaner, more efficient energy—including our on-campus efforts, procuring renewable energy for our data centers, making our data centers even more efficient and investing more than $850 million in renewable energy technologies.
And, to be honest, this is probably the area where they can have the biggest impact. As potentially high-minded as the RE<C program may have sounded, it was a li-t-t-t-tle far afield of what Google actually does, and smacked of “Google Tries to Save the World.” Said Paul Baier, vice president of sustainability consulting at Groom Energy over at
GreenBiz.com:
“Google will continue to make a material difference for the environment by focusing on greening its energy purchases (buying but not generating renewable energy), facilities (requiring energy efficient buildings), and data centers (requiring energy efficient servers). These activities are more achievable, fiscally responsible, and help drive demand.”
He added:
“Leave the large scale renewable generation projects to the utilities and the government.”
Good luck with that.
