Google Gets Renewable Energy

Every year the founders of Google write a Founders Letter and publish it. It's meant to be an "off the cuff" look at the business and industry, what's working, what's not. You can read the entire letter here.

What is interesting in the letter is how this now very large, and very profitable company is committed to the environment and addressing global warming. They use a very clever term of RE<C meaning; Renewable Energy less expensive that Carbon based energy. For those of us in the industry a REC is a Renewable Energy Credit. In the letter within the section "The World" Larry and Sergey (founders of Google) write;

"Speaking of the world, we don't want it to end-especially by environmental catastrophe. Consequently, we are working hard on our own considerable energy use in data centers by making them far more efficient. We're working directly on our own carbon/methane off sets to cover our usage. But we are all on the same Spaceship Earth, and we need to energetically address harmful emissions. To this end, we launched RE<C, an initiative to make renewable energy cheaper than coal-fired plants. We have started our own internal development effort, and have made investments in promising technologies. We are working on new clean technologies that could make more energy than we have now, and do it at a lower cost. Our goal is to generate a gigawatt (roughly enough to power San Francisco) of clean, cheap energy in years, not decades. If we are successful, we will not only help the world, but also make substantial profits."

Generating enough clean renewable energy to power a city the size of San Francisco. Certainly a big goal, but if there is a company that can do it, Google can.