Sat, Jul 05, 2008 page5

• A green equation: RE

  • By Hugh Riminton / CNN
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  Google shares have dropped by US$200 since they peaked at US$724.80 last November. The stock is hardly alone in heading south but the damage is not limited to Google shareholders.

  A couple of years ago, the Google empire was extended to Google.org. Cashed up with an endowment of 3 million Google shares, its mission was to make “strategic grants and investments.”

  The share price fall has trimmed US$600 million off that potential kitty, but Google.org executive director Larry Brilliant still has US$1.5 billion or so to play with. And much of the money is going on renewable energy research.

  It makes him a powerful player.

  By comparison, the budget of the US government’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which claims to be the “primary laboratory” for this kind of work, has averaged less than US$300 million a year since 2002.

  When it comes to clean energy research, Brilliant says, “You realize how little [money] has brought us so far and how much more money can bring us so much further.”

  The aim is summed up in this equation: RE

  It’s not mathematics. It’s simply geek-speak: The goal is to find renewable energy sources — wind, wave, geothermal, solar or anything anyone can think of — that can provide utility-scale power more cheaply than coal.

  Utility-scale? As Brilliant defines it, 1 gigawatt or more — enough to power San Francisco. “Boutique” is fine but the world can’t afford to muck around any more.

  It must be cheaper than coal, Brilliant said, because anything more expensive than coal won’t wean people off coal. And the technology must be profitable, because if it’s not, “nothing is sustainable.”

  They haven’t cracked it yet but all of this is symptomatic of another deep global shift sparked by climate change. Green was hippie. Now it’s a gold rush.

  To reframe the formula: RE

  Ron Pernick and Clint Wilder, authors of The Clean-Tech Revolution, state what is becoming increasingly obvious. “Trillions of dollars” await whoever comes up with a way out of our dirty energy dilemma.

  Dr Larry Brilliant himself was a Bay area hippie in the 1960s. He spent years living in an ashram in India before helping to eradicate smallpox. He might be part of Google these days but he believes the search giant will be dwarfed by what’s coming next.

  “The revolution we saw in Silicon Valley,” he told me, “is nothing compared to the economic and cultural potential of renewable energy.”

  Google’s investment may be a way of future-proofing its own business. General Motors, once a titan of global industry — and which still claims to be the world’s biggest automaker — is now said to be within sight of bankruptcy. Its stock price this week sank below US$10 — lower than it’s been in half a century.

  Everywhere the same message: Move or die.

  So my question is: Which one will it be? What’s the technology that’s going to meet our energy needs without cooking the planet?

  Post an online comment to “Sound Off” below my blog at www.cnn.com/goinggreen.

  And thanks for all your replies this week. I’ve learned from them. And that’s been fun.

  This is Hugh Riminton’s final “Going Green” diary entry. CNN’s special coverage of “Going Green: Search for Solutions” concludes tomorrow.
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