Green Wombat

Google the jolly green giant?

In a move to shake up the nascent renewable energy industry, Google
announced Tuesday it will spend hundreds of millions of dollars
developing new solar and wind technologies while investing in green
tech startups.

The goal, according to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page:
Send the fossil fuel industry to the coal bin of history by making
renewable energy cheaper than coal, a main culprit in the global
warming crisis.

�Assuming we can develop this, we want to deploy it as broadly as
possible," said Brin during a conference call. �Which means we�ll
license the technology or put it in place ourselves.� Of particular
interest is spreading renewable energy technology to rapidly
industrializing but coal-dependent countries like China and India.

Dubbed RE<C (as in Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal), the
Google initiative will involve hiring green energy engineers and
technologists for an in-house R&D program that will focus on
developing breakthroughs in large-scale solar power plants. At the same
time, Google’s (GOOG) philanthropic arm, Google.org, will invest in
green energy companies. Within a few years Google wants to be able to
produce a gigawatt of clean energy — enough to power a city the size
of San Francisco — at a price that will undercut cheap electricity
from coal-fired plants.

For solar energy companies, the double-headed approach raises the
prospect of both a potential brain-drain to Google and the possibility
of a payday if the search giant goes on a green tech shopping spree.
Page said Google routinely acquires "dozens of companies" and would
apply that strategy to the renewable energy initiative where
appropriate.

John O’Donnell, executive vice president of Silicon Valley solar
energy startup Ausra, said he welcomes Google’s bid to become a green
energy player.

"I think folks who have or are developing technologies that can
deliver RE<C are going to get some speedup in moving to market," he
told Green Wombat. "That’s good news for the sector and for the planet."

Ausra, backed by venture capital heavyweights Vinod Khosla and
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, builds large-scale solar power
plants and recently signed a long-term deal with California utility
PG&E (PG&E). "We’re at a more mainstream engineer/build stage,
and don’t expect hiring problems," O’Donnell added. "Google may
encourage more smart folks to seek careers in clean energy."

Given that a solar power plant can cost anywhere between half a
billion and a billion dollars or more, it appears Google will
concentrate on perfecting solar technology rather than get into the
utility business. "In terms of building power plants, hundreds of
millions of dollars is really not a large sum, so I hope they spend the
money in a highly leveraged way to get the most out of it," says John
Woolard, CEO of solar power plant startup BrightSource Energy, which is negotiating with utilities to supply 1.5 gigawatts of solar electricity.

"We
are very active in the Southwest, and would look forward to working
with a group like Google on building out power plants,"  he adds.  "I
never would have predicted that Google would emerge as a provocative
leader in large scale solar, but I am very excited about the
visibility it brings to an area of technology that we know has real economic potential."

Google already is working with two renewable energy startups. One is
eSolar, a Pasadena, Calif., developer of utility-scale solar thermal
power plants whose chairman is serial tech entrepreneur Bill Gross. The
other is Makani Power, a stealth Bay Area startup that is developing
what it calls "high-altitude wind energy extraction technologies aimed
at the most powerful wind resources." Page and Brin declined to say if
Google has invested in those companies.

PG&E spokeswoman Jennifer Zerwer said RE<C is "clearly a sign
of the growing awareness of and response to climate change — and that
is a positive trend, especially for those concerned about climate
change, as we are. While we did not work directly with Google on this
announcement, we team with them on their energy efficiency and
renewable efforts."

Like other California utilities, such as Southern California Edison
(EIX) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE), PG&E is under the gun
to obtain 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010
and 33 percent by 2020.

The move into green energy is Google’s biggest departure so far from
its core search and advertising business. But Page noted it is not a
change of mission for Google.org, which currently is managing
initiatives to promote plug-in hybrid cars.

Brin and Page took pains to stress that RE<C makes good business
sense, with the potential to profit from Google’s stake in green energy
companies or technology the company develops. Still, acknowledged Brin,
"We’re not going for huge margins. We want to deploy this fast."

"This has the ability to change the world," he added.

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Just how green is California? Deep green. Very deep green, according
to a new California Green Innovation Index compiled by Silicon Valley
venture capitalist F. Noel Perry’s non-profit Next 10 foundation.

That might be taken as so much environmental chest-thumping by Golden State partisans, but the report
— the product of Next 10 and public-interest consultants Collaborative
Economics — offers some persuasive statistics about the role green
innovation has played in California’s fortunes.

"The index analyzes key economic and environmental indicators,"
writes Perry, "including energy consumption and efficiency, economic
growth and carbon emissions, to help us better understand the role
green innovation plays in achieving two goals critical to California�s
future: 1) reducing the absolute level of the greenhouse gas emissions
that cause global warming, and 2) increasing the state�s gross domestic
product, which is the basis for our economic vitality "

The conclusion echoes one repeatedly championed by green tech
proponents, from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to Silicon Valley venture
capitalists: environmental innovation and economic prosperity go hand
in hand.

Here’s some interesting data points from the report:

• "If California�s annual statewide electricity bill was the same
  fraction of GDP as Texas…Californians would be paying almost $25
  billion more for electricity."
• California holds  44% of United States patents in solar technologies and 37% in wind.
• The Golden State has 36 percent of the U.S.’s  green tech venture capital investment.
• "California utility efficiency programs….reduced the need for 24
  power plants between 1975 and 2003….The California Energy Commission
  estimates that building and appliance standards alone have saved
  residents and businesses $56 billion through 2003 and are projected to
  save another $23 billion by 2013."
• "More Californians recycle than vote" (More than 50 percent of Californians recycle.)
• "Per capita CO2 emissions in Texas are double those of California.
  Per capita emissions levels in California today are slightly lower than
  they were 15 years ago."
• California has about 90 percent of the market for energy-efficient
  dishwasher and about 50 percent of the market for energy-efficient
  refrigerators and washing machines

Concludes Next 10: "The growing distance between the trend lines of
GDP rising and emissions dropping represent the delinking of GHG
emissions from economic growth."

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The devastating San Francisco Bay oil spill brought out thousands of
volunteers over the weekend eager to help clean up miles of beaches and
shoreline contaminated with toxic bunker fuel and rescue hundreds of
petroleum-coated birds. If ever there was a disaster area suited to
exploit Internet technology to crowdsource an army of green berets and
deploy them where they’re needed most, it’s this Twittering, Google
map-mashing epicenter of Web 2.0, right?

Not quite. The masses may be wired but California authorities’
disaster response was strictly 1.0, as Green Wombat discovered when he
showed up at a meeting on Saturday called by the state Department of
Fish and Game to brief would-be volunteers about the oil spill from the
Cosco Busan. The container ship hit the Bay Bridge last Wednesday,
dumping 58,000 gallons of heavy oil into the water. A couple hundred
people crammed a room at the Richmond Marina in the East Bay, spilling
outside into the drizzling rain. As the crowd peppered officials with
questions about how they could get to work — a few yards away a dull
oily sheen streaked the harbor — DFG representatives patiently
explained that volunteers must first receive training before they can
be allowed to handle wildlife or clean beaches covered in a hazardous
substance.

"We have to get information from you to place you," said a
representative from the DFG’s Office of Spill Prevention and Response
as paper forms were handed out for volunteers to fill in. They soon ran
out of forms — more than 500 people had shown up at another volunteer
meeting held a few hours earlier in San Francisco. Many members of the
audience, BlackBerries and Treos in hand, stared in disbelief. Paper?
"I’m from Autodesk (ADSK) in Marin and we have 1,500 people that want
to get to work on the cleanup," said one woman. "Can’t you just put up
a PDF on your site so we can download it?" Said another volunteer:
Can’t we just send you an e-mail?"

To be fair, state officials were overwhelmed by the response from
Bay Area residents. ("An oil spill in San Francisco is so different
than any other place for one reason: the people," one DFG official said
at the meeting. "People here are passionate about where they live.")
And by Sunday morning, the oil response unit’s site
had posted a Yahoo (YHOO) e-mail address (coscobusanspill@yahoo.com) so
volunteers could send in their contact details. Still, if you wanted to
report sightings of injured wildlife or contaminated shoreline, you had
to spend a lot of time hitting redial to try to get through jammed
phone lines.

The
authorities’ old-media disaster response strategy of relying on
newspapers and television to broadcast one-way messages to a population
accustomed to Internet interactivity is missing an opportunity to
coordinate a faster and better targeted cleanup operation. For
instance, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported,
residents of the coastal hamlet of Bolinas north of San Francisco were
left on their own as they struggled to place a boom across the mouth of
the Bolinas Lagoon to keep oil out of the environmentally sensitive
Marin County estuary, home to a hundred bird species and a colony of
harbor seals.

Now imagine if an Internet database of volunteers and their
locations was mashed up with a Google (GOOG) map of oil-threatened
areas. Would-be volunteers could go online to see where assistance was
needed near them or they could be notified by e-mail or text message.
Extra bodies and equipment might have helped avoid what Green Wombat
found when he and his son visited the eastern shore of Bolinas Lagoon
on Sunday: globs of thick purple-black oil dotting the rocks while a
dozen endangered California brown pelicans floated off a nearby sandbar
where seals bask during low tide. (Photo at right.)

An online map mashup or wiki page would have also helped wildlife rescuers
collect old sheets and towels and other materials needed to clean
oil-soaked birds as well as coordinate volunteers to provide support to
cleanup crews. As it was, Green Wombat happened to hear a volunteer at
the Richmond meeting mention that you could drop off sheets at the
Berkeley Marina, where rescued birds were being collected. Stopping by
the marina on Sunday, we found another ad hoc group of volunteers
helping along the shoreline cordoned off with yellow police tape.

This is not to say creating a Web 2.0 emergency response system
would be easy — particularly when it means integrating such an
operation with government agencies. But it sounds like an opportunity
for some established Internet company or entrepreneur. In the meantime,
Bay Area residents, environmental groups and local governments are
organizing themselves online, turning to — where else? — Facebook to
set up oil spill clearinghouses to exchange information and coordinate
haz mat training sessions for volunteers.

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Steve Jobs’s green manifesto is bubbling about the blogosphere and much is being made over whether  (AAPL) waived the white flag under pressure from a Greenpeace campaign, which labeled the company an ecotard – as Fake Steve might put it – for its past "failure to take a green initiative."  Of much more interest to Green Wombat than the pissing match between Jobs and the enviros, or the not-so-veiled jabs he made at rivals, is how Apple has raised the bar on environmental disclosure. Ironically enough, given Jobs’s obsession with keeping secrets, he detailed the amount of various toxic chemicals present in Apple’s computers and iPods and disclosed future manufacturing plans to remove them. Of course, all this served to show that Apple, despite its previous opaqueness, is greener than its competitors. Still, for all the press releases issued by Dell (DELL), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Sun Microsystems (SUNW) trumpeting various environmental initiatives, few have discussed in detail such topics as the arsenic, mercury, cadmium and hexavalent chromium content of their products and specific plans to eliminate the chemicals. For instance, Jobs said Apple will begin to sell mercury-free Macs this year that use LED backlight technology for their screens and will also begin using arsenic-free glass. And he revealed that Apple phased out the use of some hazardous materials in recent years thanks to innovative design. Jobs pledged to completely end the use of others by the end of 2008. Apple has been slammed for its e-recycling polices and the fact that its flooding the planet with millions of iPods that will soon be discarded for the latest model. Jobs said the company this summer would expand its free take-back policy at U.S. Apple stores to all outlets worldwide. He also noted that Apple makes its computers with high-quality materials in demand by recyclers. "Few of our competitors do the same."

"We apologize for leaving you in the dark for this long," Jobs concluded, promising to provide updates on the company’s green deeds, including an examination of its products’ carbon foot print. "Apple is already a leader in innovation and engineering, and we are applying these same talents to become an environmental leader."  Coming from another company that might just be a standard-issue feel-good line. If Jobs’s becomes as obsessive about the environmental design of iPods and iPhones as he does their look, feel and function, then other consumer electronics makers are about to face some real competition on the green front.

Why Apple left increasingly eco-conscious customers unenlightened about what appears to be years of work to remove toxic chemicals from its computers and gadgets remains a public relations strategy best plumbed by bloggers like David Swain at Clean PR.

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