Google closing in on cheap renewable energy – Technology – livemint.com

Weihl said the odds of success had gone up in the last year or so from a long shot to a real possibility of demonstrating working technology in a few years’ time.

“It is even odds, more or less,” he said. “In three years, we could have multiple megawatts of plants out there.”

The company has made investments in advanced geothermal and wind, but engineers inside Google are focused mostly on solar thermal, in which the sun’s energy is used to heat up a substance that produces steam to turn a turbine. Mirrors focus the sun’s rays on the heated substance.

By contrast, photovoltaic solar cells, the most commonly known form of solar power, turn the sun’s rays directly into electricity.

“We are looking at ways of cheaply getting to much higher temperatures and also making the heliostats, the fields of mirrors that have to track the sun, reflect the sun, keep it focused on the target we are trying to heat up — make those much, much cheaper. And I think we’ve made some really interesting progress in the last six to nine months,” he said.

Solar thermal has the best economics right now for a competitive energy resource. Solar PV is many years away and Google is doing the right thing by concentrating on this.

The three years timeframe is really great. This would be the start of the energy revolution. May be the next stage in cheap energy for the world and especially for developing countries. And it took only $50m till now!

I like the way Google has encapsulated a very important idea in a simple, mathematical form of Renewable Energy is less than Coal – RE<C.

More on this in the following videos (from Reuters)

Bill Weihl on RE<C

Weihl on solar thermal