Slashdot Mirror
Google Applies To Become Energy Marketer
necro81 writes "Google consumes massive amounts of electrical energy to power its data centers across the country and world. Now it has created a subsidiary, Google Energy LLC, and applied (pdf) to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to become a utility-scale energy trader. Google's stated aim is to be able to purchase renewable energy directly from producers at bulk rates, pursuing its goal of becoming carbon neutral. It is likely that Google Energy would also permit Google's own renewable energy projects to sell their energy at more favorable rates. Google reportedly does not have plans to actively become an energy broker, a la Enron."
Google also didn't have plans to make an operating system, a phone, a phone os, an instant messenger, a usenet application or a social network.
So yeah, this isn't Genron. Really.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
...about Google's "Smart Meter" for your home. It seems like Google wants to know everything about everybody. The only difference between them and other entities that what this much information is that Google's gradually arriving to that goal.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
The DoJ already has one anti-trust suit going on with Google, and several EU counties (hello, France) are also investigating. Since google is a large consumer of energy, the potential for market distortions is obvious.
Google reportedly does not have plans to actively become an energy broker, a la Enron."
I rather doubt anyone has plans to be "a la Enron"
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Google's stated aim is to be able to purchase renewable energy directly from producers at bulk rates, pursuing its goal of becoming carbon neutral.
Some quick observations about Iowa. Back in 2008, we covered Microsoft and Google opening up half billion dollar server farms in this state because energy was supposedly cheaper there and tax incentives. Now, if you look at the year end totals for Iowa's wind power capacity in MW you'll notice that through 2008 it jumped higher than any other year going from 1,273 to 2,791. It more than doubled. At the end of 2009 it was at 2,862 -- perhaps a result of the recession -- but also indicative of what's going on in the state. Put two and two together and I think it's obvious that wind power companies were looking to work with Google and were maybe even encouraged by Google.
You know, I was really glad to see this sort of thing happen. It was something that Google could spend money doing that would boost shareholder value while at the same time incentivizing companies to invest billions in wind power in Iowa with a lengthy ten year or more plan to gain that money back before they start to turn serious profits. If Google gets these wind power plants up and running, ten years from now we the consumers might be enjoying a price war between wind power fields generating electricity on equipment that has been paid for and now just needs maintenance fees. Think about it, a whole infrastructure springing up on Google's promises and investor's dimes being slowly amortized back up to very profitable and freaking awesome for ma and pa corn grower. The economy would go nuts if you could alleviate energy costs for everyone. In addition to the slow and welcomed change, the industries that will be negatively affected (coal, gas, etc) by these price wars will have the time to realize and change or better yet invest in their own wind farms. If this model is proven successful, tornado alley could in fifty years become the new middle east and we'll be fighting wind wars over South Dakota and Kansas.
Now, back to the story, this vertical integration strategy is awesome for the company but I don't like it for two reasons. 1) In my opinion it is a step down the path to a weak version of a monopoly and competition deterrent 2) If Google influences these companies too much or worse buys them out, we might never see a price war I mentioned above. These are distant fears and after the Ma Bell and Microsoft monopolies/anti-trusts/Sherman Act prosecutions, I trust the DoJ won't sit idly by if point one or two become uncomfortable truths.
Google reportedly does not have plans to actively become an energy broker, a la Enron.
That kind of reassures me.
Overly optimistic? Of course. A little unrealistic? Well, a man can dream, can't he? A man can dream.
My work here is dung.
Is a great way of increasing your control over society.
If you want to take over the world you need people who rely on you not only for internet search but more basic things like energy, food, communications (like all the fibre optic cables Google controls)
Right now if google went away I'd just go back to using yahoo for search, my life won't change much but if Google does all your computing for you in De Cloud via HTTP, supplies you with power and internet (Google TiSP), organises your transport via driverless pod then it becomes a bit harder to tell them to go f*** themselves with their privacy-invading ways.
if at Ballmers next team talk all the employees pulled out their Nexus Ones to photograph him.
And now microsoft is going to try to buy Hoover Damn. Gotta keep up with the Joneses.
Welcome to the start of the Matrix..
I worked in the energy market, specifically in electricity (not as a trader). First, Enron pretty much invented the market for electricity ("power trading"), it was the (mis)management that sunk the company. The problem with renewables, and wind in particular, is the unpredictability. You can end up with a lot of power delivered to you and you may end up paying somebody to get rid of it, as you cannot consume it all. So if Google wants to buy wind power for its own consumption, it makes all the sense in the world to enter the market and trade as well.
If you type "google" into google it'll break the internet.
Yes, I know the "Do no evil" thing... and who really believes it's not actually "Do no evil [to our shareholders]"?
But Google is beginning to sprawl into some extremely creative areas and the amount of data it can collect on people is probably among the most detailed of any single entity out there. I actually don't know how close Google is to any given government or government agency or what its compliance history is with its decisions to comply with [morally] questionable requests made by government, but I seem to recall a recent story talking about Google and China.
For what it's worth, I am still using Google as my default search engine... I am not sure I am that scared of them yet.
I wish, but not only would that add proof to the claim that antitrust laws only apply to the tech industry, it would shift attention away from other industries that badly need to be stratified.
The Google monolith grows regardless. There could be some positive aspects to this; if Google creates market incentives to build valuable and reliable renewable energy infrastructure throughout the nation, the benefits should be fairly obvious. However, combined with news of their 'smart meter' and Google's obvious desire for a lucrative information monopoly, I'm not sure I feel comfortable having them at the helm of any infrastructure project. We'll just have to see what happens.
The more I think about it, from a physicist POV, energy is always out there. It's waiting for us to tap it.
If Google want's to use it's resources to try and tap some of the energy that is out there, and in a way that is good for our planet/society, I say game on.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
It's the spread between the money Google collects up front from advertisers and the money it rarely pays out - how many people actually click on ads? I don't.
It's a great racket:
Hey advertisers! Get word sensitive ads placed next to topics that people are actually looking at! - They collect the money from the advertisers.
Now do the folks hosting the ads get the money? Not unless someone clicks on the ads, otherwise they get nothing from Google.
Brilliant move on Google's part.
It's even better than the extended warranty racket!
One day, it hit me how much access that Google has to my life and my data. I still use gmail, but I uninstalled all of the Google desktop applications from my home and work machines. I now actively avoid Google applications that in any way can be associated with my person.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The google party? Google state? When will it end? Who will stop them? Google has, without a doubt, come out with a lot of good products (their search engine, Gmail, Nexus) Almost everybody with a PC has used at least two of their services once!
Who's watching them? What is their master business plan (other than more money)?
All this can result into good products and services that other companies cannot compete, however, this leaves them with too much control where with the flip of a switch things can easily go wrong.
This vaguely reminds me of William Randolph Hearst's stake in the paper industry, which was a supported his main business, which was major print media. From Wikipedia: Jack Herer and others argue that Hearst's paper empire (he owned hundreds of acres of timber forests and a vast number of paper mills designed to manufacture paper from wood pulp) in the early 1930s was threatened by hemp, which: 1) like wood pulp, could also be used to manufacture paper[12] and 2) also had an advantage over wood pulp, because it could be regrown yearly as well.[12]
Does this mean every time I turn on a lamp I'm going to get hit with half a dozen ads for matching coffee tables?
Or should I just flip the light switch marked "I'm feeling lucky?"
f u cn rd ths u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgmng
The way it's going, I am gleefully awaiting announcement of the Google Republic.
Once large, wave powered data-centers are combined into a large floating terabit-networked landmass it will be a utopia for nerds and techs alike.
Build an industrial solar thermal plant right next to it,
Sell excess energy.
Hell, take a billion and build a 50 Gw IST array.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Everywhere i read i see posts from astroturfers pretending to be very concerned about their privacy. Lambasting Google for all they are worth and trying to purport them as a very evil and vile company.
The thing is, Google hasnt got half of the information many other sources has like twitter, facebook etc. The problem isnt that Google has access to vast amount of data. To provide good search technology and ad placement they have to analyze things, just like every other ad network does, like Microsofts for eg.
The problem isnt Google or Microsoft Bing but rather that the governments can demand any and all information about you at a whim. Not just from Google but from your bank, healtcare, utilities, ISP, telephone companies, other sites etc etc. If the information about your searches etc isnt at google its somewhere else. The only way to avoid getting stuff logged is to get off the net.
This problem is so easy to understand that its blatantly clear that this is all part of a campaign to paint Google as an evil company. Instead you should put pressure on the politicians to stop snooping into your life and write strong privacy laws. A small number of people are so stupid they fall for the Microsoft astroturfing but one would think people on slashdot would understand perfectly whats going on.
HTTP/1.1 400
The way things are starting to look, I would be surprised if in a few years all Google employees are to be given guns and told to be on the lookout for a suave, British spy.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
So now there's General Electric (GE), and looks like Google wants to have Google Energy (GE). I wonder if they two will overlap?
Looks like Google is more affectionate towards becoming the next General Electric than IBM or Microsoft. Needless to say, General Electric has quite the history - several decades longer than IBM's (1850's vs. 1890's). In Google's short history (1990's to present) they seem to have diversified the company quite fast into numerous markets - more along the lines of how General Electric is diversified. Comparatively, Microsoft has a longer history (1970's to present), which most of its diversification occurring since roughly 1996 - prior, Microsoft was software only and heavily centric on their own products - even today they still tend to be but now they have some hardware and services mixed in; Google probably still puts them to shame in diversity of products though, or at least it is very close.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
I don't think you're counting the U.S. Military as a subsidy, but IIRC most of our road trips in the last century boiled down to preserving our control over the lands vital to our energy interests. Repatriating our energy supply would make our military mostly redundant, IMHO.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Smoke and Mirrors [2.5]
John: I don't think that's true.
Jen: With all due respect John, I am the head of IT and I have it on good authority. If you type "Google" into Google, you can break the Internet. So please, no one try it, even for a joke. (the executives laugh) It's not a laughing matter. You can break the Internet!
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_IT_Crowd
The third season is really great if you didn't catch it.
If you have yet to read into the history of Enron, then better jump into a wiki or the newsies and dig. Enron's books were cooked to the point they were past charcoal. Power corrupts, but cash corrupts all, both weak and strong. If Google turns into one such brokerage, I hope that they keep a tight reign on their cash flow.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Now I'll need to find a way of hooking up AdBlock to my electricity meter!
Man, I completely don't remember, now, where I saw this, but I remember seeing a clip at the beginning of a comedy movie from like the 1940 or 1950's or something, where one guy is sent out by his wife to sell pies, and he meets a friend, and they get to talking (while the 'friend' starts eating the pies that are supposed to be sold), and they start up a discussion where they talk about starting a pie company.
As the discussion goes along, the guy who was gonna start the pie company decides that, in order to keep his costs down, and to generate additional revenue streams, he's gonna buy steel mills (for the metal to make the pie tins from), flour mills, wheat farms and sugar cane plantations, a paper company, a printer (to print labels and advertising), railroads (cheaper shipping around the country), telephone companies, banks - basically, the guy decides he needs to buy the whole economy so that he can get the best price on every product and service which is even peripherally associated with making and selling pies.
Google Energy, LLC just brought that to mind. Not saying it's a bad idea, but by the time they're done, Google is either going to be broke, or buy everything.
Nuff said.
Welcome to Enron 2.0!
You poor deluded man. Grenada. Haiti. Somalia. Serbia. Afghanistan, WWII, WWI. I'll give you Vietnam and Korea for free.
If they will push more low to zero carbon energy, they can make it cheaper. As it is, they are backing potter drilling. Find locations Colorado or Wyoming that are away from large buildings and do the geo-thermal energy.
Likewise, it would be good if they bought some old coal plants and convert them to natural gas combined with Solar Thermal.
Basically, Google can help push our society where it fights heading.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
How long before Google declares sovereignty?
Seriously. They own an airstrip. They own what amounts to a public transit system. They own scads of land. They have what amounts to a treasury. Now they want to become an electrical power utility. What's missing?
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
I don't really think this has all that much to do with renewables, and everything to do with using their market share and data mining resources to build demand response capacity. Simplifying a little bit, in a power market (like Texas's ERCOT or the Midatlantic's PJM), you can "bid" a reduction in capacity/energy use into the market the same way a utility running a power plant can bid actual generation. Utility companies already have programs which lower your thermostat, cut off your water heater etc etc, it wouldn't surprise me if Google was attempting to do this on a larger, commericial scale.
Google currently has their "PowerMeter" service as a monitoring tool, but this could be expanded to a remote demand-response application (like Utility DR), allowing them to aggregate residential and small commercial customers. With their data mining abilities it won't be hard to accurately predict how much reduction in electricity demand they can actually get (how much you actually can handle your AC being turned down, not how much you say you will), and they can bid that demand into the power markets.
I recently worked at a utility which was concerned about a Google and/or Wal-Mart entry into the power markets. Why? They both have the name recognition and infrastructure to develop/market these programs to huge customer bases and undercut the current efforts. Interesting that this could be their big first step towards that.
I believe aluminum smelters sometimes work using this model, only running production at times of cheaper power, or if they are power producers themselves, selling into the grid when what they can get for it exceeds the profits they would get from making aluminum. Or say any factory that was capable of fast startup, then fast shutdown, perhaps highly automated and not needing too many humans involved, something that didn't need to run exactly full time or on an exact set schedule.
There are similar arrangements that could be put into place to usefully soak up surplus power at times, and google's idea of energy metering goes along with that. Example, charging electric car fleets, or perhaps whenever home battery bank tech gets better and cheaper, you would buy to charge your bank when the rates are the cheapest. You could stagger your home demands, such as running the washing machine when it is cheaper, etc., automatically. The power companies themselves have started using pumped water during low demand times to return water upstream of their dams and turbines, when there is lower demand for their electric product.
Basically though, I don't think excess power is near the problem that lack of power causes, when demand exceeds supply. In the UK now they are shutting off natgas delivery to factories because other demand is so huge because of the deep freeze going on. (although I think they should shut off power to artificial paper financial product trading houses that are mostly just gambling around with their synthetics before they restrict power to their remaining tangibles goods factories.. that's just another side issue on priorities and what really helps an economy or not)
Well it could be argued that our involvement in the Pacific Theater of WWII stemmed from Japan not wanting us to monopolize the energy/raw materials available from the Philipines and Indonesia.
And yes I have heard of Pearl Harbor.
Read all the little bits, people...
2005: Google starts buying up dark fiber.
2007: Google buying land in middle of nowhere, near power stations, building data centers.
Now throw in GoogleTalk, Wave, Phone, Chrome, Android...and now the Nexus-1?
My hypothesis for the next 5 years of Google:
1. Become an ISP, like ComCast, TimeWarner, etc...
2. Become a telco like Qwest, Verizon, AT&T, etc...
3. Become a broadcaster like ABC, NBC, FOX, etc...
4. Become a wireless provider like T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, etc...
Pay close attention, folks. This is going to happen, and it's going to happen fast.
[End Of Line]
Google knows my search history, if that was published (or some parts of it, taken out of context), there would be stuff that can be used to humiliate me. But that's not all. They know all the sites I visit (Well, all with Google Analytics, Ads by Google, all sites I've found with Google... And that's before making any assumption about deals with other web analytics companies and the like). They can read my e-mail (not all of it. I have several adresses. Still surely enough to humiliate me with something.). They know why my friends are (based on those e-mails) and have access to all that information about my friends and family members too. In addition, they could ensure that all my acquiantaces have access to that information: Just have it come up as the first result when people (family, friends, new neighbours, potential employers) search with my name.
At that point... It doesn't really matter if they know something more. Google can completely destroy my life already so I'm not worried about them learning more. Why would I be? That's also why I don't bother with blocking Google Analytics with NoScript: It's too late for me.
On the other hand, some entity will always know nearly any given thing about me. When it comes to electricity, it is the company supplying me the current, etc... I want Google to be that entity in everything possible: It's better to tell more about me to the company that can already ruin me anyways than to give that power to many more companies.