Google Invests into Wind Turbine Farms
Search giant Google has invested $38.8m (£25.5m) in two wind farms in the US from its Google.org philanthropic arm.
The investment is the latest in a string of projects that Google seems to be interested in. For a number of years now Google has stated that they are committed to helping build a green energy future and just a couple of months ago in February was granted a license in the US to trade energy on the wholesale market and to offer it as a retail product to the end consumer.
The main reason for this as with other large organisations that consume vast amounts of electricity is for largely a cost saving move although many commentators read a little more into it than that.
Google energy also offer the google powermeter which is a free energy monitoring software tool that allows you to view and analyse your own home or business electricity usage and delve deeper into the data in an attempt to reduce your consumption and cost along the way. The google powermeter integrates with some energy companies and at least one in the UK will allow this to be achieved.
Google.org also has the RE<C project that aims to make renewable energy cheaper than coal fired power. In fact in the UK you can certainly choose 100% green renewable tariffs that don’t cost any more than one of the big 6 energy companies standard tariffs (OK, these are the most expensive and fixed length deals and offers always beat that but at least the cost of going green is certainly not as expensive as it used to be).
The wind farm investment
The investment that Google has made is to generate at least 170MW of wind powered energy and a Google spokesperson said that “the investment marked something of a shift in the company’s green investment strategy after it earlier funded a number of high profile green start up companies”.
The stakes in NextEra a top US wind power generating company use a form of tax equity investments where the money invested can be offset against taxed paid on regular profits made by the company. The investment means Google owns around 20% of the B class shares (of which $190m were sold but the other investors were not named).
Google also said that this investment was to “accelerate the deployment of renewable energy in a way that makes good business sense too”. This would seem just the early stages for this type of investment project in green energy because a blog post by Rick Needham who is Google’s green business operations manager said “we look forward to finding more opportunities to invest in renewable energy projects that use the latest technologies to push the envelope for delivering low cost clean energy”.
Why are Google investing in renewable energy projects ? Well the google.org side of the business has been pushing for energy policies that strengthen the innovation pipeline so that “help us at last put in place what has been lacking in terms of clean energy innovation: a robust pipeline extending from basic research to applied research to demonstration projects to commercial scale-up to full deployment. At Google, we call this cycle “Lightbulbs to Lightbulbs” — from the initial “lightbulb moment” of invention to full commercial deployment.”
Why are they doing that ? We are sure time will tell…
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