Google Aims To Reform Energy Grid

Google hopes to do for the power grid what it did for the Web.

Having conquered the market for Web search by first simplifying how it is done and then making sales of related advertising more efficient, Google is now funding green technology and using its brand power to lobby for policy change.

Google introduced a plan Wednesday to wean the United States off the burning of coal and oil for power by 2030 and to cut oil use for cars by 40 percent. Such initiatives could cost trillions of dollars, but Google believes they should ultimately save money.

Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said the annual cost of the Google energy plan would still be less than the $700 billion being considered to bail out the financial industry. He also cited parallels between the energy challenge and the credit crisis.

"That is an unconscionable failure of system design," he said, referring to the credit crisis. "It is inconceivable to me that the sum of the financial industry would have created that as a possible outcome."

He said Google had not yet felt the economic impact of the financial turmoil, but he added that it was hard to say what would happen next.

"There is an equivalent-scale problem in energy," he said after delivering a speech to the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco. His talk was titled "Where Would Google Drill?"

"I'm a computer scientist and computer scientists love scale problems," Schmidt said. "We like scale and replication and leverage in a technical way."

Through its philanthropic arm, Google.org, the company is backing start-ups designing wind, solar and geothermal technologies, which it hopes will eventually be cheaper than coal. Google invested $45 million in such companies this year.

"But that is a drop when we need a flood," Google says on its official blog.

Calls for energy efficiency and...