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Google, the Internet company with a seemingly limitless source of revenue, plans to get into the business of finding limitless sources of energy.
The company, based in Mountain View, Calif., announced Tuesday that it intended to develop and help stimulate the creation of renewable energy technologies that are cheaper than coal-generated power.
Google said it would spend hundreds of millions of dollars, part of that to hire engineers and energy experts to investigate alternative energies like solar, geothermal and wind power. The effort is aimed at reducing Google’s own mounting energy costs to run its vast data centers, while also fighting climate change and helping to reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels.
The company also said that Google.org, the philanthropic for-profit subsidiary that Google seeded in 2004 with three million shares of its stock, would invest in energy start-ups.
Google says its goal is to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy — enough to power the city of San Francisco — more cheaply than coal-generated electricity. The company predicted that this can be accomplished in “years, not decades.”
Idealism is hardly new at Google. In their Letter From the Founders before the company’s 2004 initial public stock offering, Mr. Page and Mr. Brin wrote: “Our goal is to develop services that significantly improve the lives of as many people as possible. In pursuing this goal, we may do things that we believe have a positive impact on the world, even if the near-term financial returns are not obvious.”
Amongst many other grants made by Google.org. ,beneficiaries include:-
- Acumen Fund: $ 5,200,000 to support Acumen’s entrepreneurial approaches to address global poverty and services for the poor
- PlanetRead: $345,000 to support Same Language Subtitling (SLS) programs in India.
- Seva Fund: $2,000,000 to support programs to prevent blindness and restore eyesight in India, Nepal, Tibet, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Egypt, Tanzania and Guatemala
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