Slashdot Mirror
Google Goes Green
foobsr writes "Google today announced its RE<C project to make renewable energy cheaper than coal in the near future. The company, and its charitable arm google.org, plan to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the initiative. Larry Page stated: 'With talented technologists, great partners and significant investments, we hope to rapidly push forward. 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.'"
These are the kinds of initiatives that one can applaud when they're coming from a public company. Interestingly, this isn't just an idle PR stunt, or vain charity. While Google expects to invest "tens of millions" into pilot projects, they also are committing themselves to investing "hundreds of millions" into those projects that are likely to yield positive returns.
I have spent so long lamenting the short-sightedness of American business, that it's easy to overlook the fact that at least some companies are willing to stake their immediate earnings on potentially much greater gains in the future. It's therefore very nice to see Google at the forefront of energy innovation because, let's face it, as a geek, that's exactly where I'd be pouring a fair portion of my post-billionaire funds. That and space... but alas Brin hasn't decided to finance his own airospace company YET...
Professor Page, are you telling me you built a tiiiime machine, out of a Priiiiius?!
I hope, when they die, cartoon characters have to answer for their sins.
Jobs doesn't have to make pledges; they just have to figure out how to convert the radiation of his reality distortion field to energy, and to use the pressure of the smugness from his customers to power iPods. Ballmer is currently busy with research to tap heat from system administrator's heads when updating, and he's already made great strides to put the kinetic energy of chairs in something useful.
The machines in The Matrix story were so dumb.
Skies darkened to block out the Sun so that their solar power sources would be negated? Well, duh. What was stopping them from building taller solar power collectors that were above the black stuff? Neo and Trinity penetrated the layer, didn't they?
Alternatively, they could have used whatever power source the remaining free humans were using: Zion wasn't powered by human batteries, was it?
Worst Plot Hole Ever.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
The current problem with rapidly escalating oil prices is not related to US refinery capacity. If the bottleneck was at the refinery level, crude would be cheap and gasoline would be expensive. In fact, both are expensive.
A statement like "more oil is currently known to exist than any other time in human history" is absurd, and I wonder how you arrived at it. We don't know how much oil exists, partly because some of it is - as you say - "undiscovered", ie we think it might be out there but we don't know for sure - but mostly because OPEC lie about the size of their remaining reserves. Data quality in the oil industry is poor to non-existant. We don't even have accurate figures for how much we pump out of the ground each day, let alone how much we have left.
You are confused about the pricing of sour crudes. Yes, they are cheaper, but not significantly so. The spot price of Mexican Maya on the 16th was $79, only about $10-$12 less than the price of the high quality stuff. Given that oil used to cost $10-$12 the fact that sour has risen to slightly less than sweet is really of no consequence.
You say there's no factual information to indicate that we're at peak. But world production has been flat since the summer of 2004, despite progressively increasing prices (due to increased demand from Asia) providing every incentive to pump more. This behavior has not been seen before and strongly suggests that world production capacity is maxed out - there are huge wins to be had by any company or country that can significantly boost production, but doing an analysis of an oil major like ExxonMobil, will show that their existing fields decline as fast as they can replace them. To me this is a pretty good sign that we're at peak - inability to raise production despite huge demand.
The whole "it's an oil industry conspiracy" won't wash, sorry. This isn't like the computer industry where one or two companies can dominate the landscape - oil is a commodity, and the price is not set by the oil companies but by supply and demand. It's the simplest market you can get. Anybody who is sitting on top of a giant oil field right now would be an idiot to leave it for tomorrow, because there's no guarantee we'll want that oil tomorrow - maybe there's a recession and oil demand is reduced. Maybe we discover better ways to power our cars.
Right now there's a lead-in time of at least 5 years from discovering a field to first commercial oil, sometimes longer. Even if you start today, there is risk. If you leave it longer, the risk gets even bigger. At least for private oil companies, there are huge financial incentives to boost production and thus get a leg up over your competitors in stock price and profits. To claim that the entire industry is in a cartel to deliberately hold back production is to reveal your lack of knowledge around discovery trends, skills shortages and the impact on depletion rates of modern production techniques like horizontal wells/waterflooding.
Have you heard it burn rubber when the stoplight goes green? Electric motors like the Prius uses are amazing at producing off-the-line torque. Combine that with its low weight, and you find that the Prius actually out-accelerates most cars on the road.
As an environmental move, whether hybrid drivetrains represent a net win is a little ambiguous (until we get plug-in hybrids). But for performance, they have a lot of pretty exciting advantages.
I was on a University team which built a hybrid formula-style racecar. That thing blew the pants off of Ferraris. In fact, it was originally entered for the general Formula SAE event, which then outlawed hybrids as having an unfair advantage. (So we started another competition just for hybrid vehicles.)
Want to see what electric motors can do? Check out the Tesla Roadster. And it only uses an AC induction motor (hence "Tesla")!!
(The fact that it "only" uses an induction motor is important because induction motors, though cheap and durable, are not even the money-no-object "best" option: That would be a permanent magnet synchronous DC motor.)
The downside to electric drivetrains is that they have more components, and electric motors are heavy, so their more impressive torque needs to make up for the increased weight. But the fact is that, currently, hybrids do exactly that, and, as motors get lighter, the advantages will only get more and more pronounced.
Have you heard the quiet, confident, high-tech sound of a really powerful electric motor spooling up? It's truly a beautiful sound.