Google gets go-ahead to buy, sell energy
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has authorized Google Energy to buy and sell electricity in bulk like any other utility.
The FERC, the agency with oversight of the U.S. power grid, signed an order (PDF) on Thursday that grants Google Energy market-based rate authorization. This paves the way for the search giant to not only better manage its own energy costs, but to possibly add electricity marketer to its repertoire of services.
The order specifically grants Google Energy--a subsidiary of Google--the rights "for the sale of energy, capacity, and ancillary services at market-based rates" while acknowledging that neither Google Energy nor its affiliates "own or control any generation or transmission" facilities.
Google has expressed a desire for access to larger amounts of renewable energy to help produce the electricity it consumes as part of its vast search-engine empire. Google has long maintained that its goal is to become a carbon-neutral company. As a side note, it's not unusual for large companies to be granted the authority to trade in the wholesale electricity market for the purpose of managing their own energy costs.
As recently as January--after Google Energy made its request to FERC--the company maintained that its expressed immediate wish was for more control over electricity pricing to more effectively gain access to affordable renewable energy.
"Right now, we can't buy affordable, utility-scale, renewable energy in our markets. We want to buy the highest quality, most affordable renewable energy wherever we can and use the green credits," Google representative Niki Fenwick told CNET News at the time.
But it seems that Google may actually enter the energy business. The search giant formed the Delaware-based subsidiary called Google Energy in December and when asked about it, hinted at a future in energy.
"We don't have any concrete plans. We want the ability to buy and sell electricity in case it becomes part of our portfolio," Fenwick told CNET News in January.
Google's escalating interest in energy
Prior to that obvious play, the company has been testing the energy industry waters through green energy technology investment, and research.
In 2007, Google pledged to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to help engineers and scientists figure out a way to generate 1 gigawatt of clean electricity and make it cheaper than coal.
In 2008, Google CEO Eric Schmidt presented an energy plan--complete with explicit math calculations--to back up an idea for how the U.S. could eventually get 100 percent of its electric power generation from renewable sources, cut emissions by half, create more jobs, and decrease overall energy costs.
Google has also invested hundred of millions in green energy technology research and start-up companies with projects in wind, solar, solar thermal, and geothermal. It has invested in projects to develop plug-in hybrid cars and has developed with its own "smart charging" software for plug-in electric vehicles.
The company has launched its own energy pilot projects including a 1.6-megawatt solar installation for its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, thought to be the largest corporate-owned installation in the U.S.
Google has even developed a smart metering software platform for monitoring and regulating home electricity use from any Web-enabled phone. Google Power has been testing the software in the U.K., as well as unveiling a U.S. version for smart phones.
Its most notable electricity investment success story might be eSolar, a start-up that grew out of the Google Idealab and offers "turnkey" thermal solar energy plants using software-controlled heliostats. The company has already garnered over 500 megawatts worth of projects for Southern California Edison and several utilities in the southwestern U.S., with projects in the pipeline for China, Spain, the Middle East, and South Africa.
Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were also early investors in the electric car maker Tesla.
And in the lead-up to the recent Copenhagen summit on climate change, Google hosted its own energy conference in November that included leading energy experts and the U.S. undersecretary of energy.
Google could not immediately be reached for comment.
Candace Lombardi, a freelance journalist based in the Boston area, focuses on the evolution of green and otherwise cutting-edge technologies, from robots to cars to scientific innovation. She is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not a current employee of CNET. E-mail Candace. 
Enron failed while most utilties are still here. Apparently it's possible to buy and sell power and not go bankrupt.
http://www.anaheim.net/administration/PIO/news.asp?id=171
Maybe a name change is in order? Omni-google??
While Google may have legitimate and truly workable solutions for many of this country's problems and the planet, Congress has proven time and time again that if it doesn't line their individual coffers, politicians will find a way to pervert a wise solution into a bureaucratic stand still.
Too much individual greed and the here and now mentality and not enough plan for our future thinking.
Oh well. Thankfully my statistical lifespan is only 75 or so. Unfortunately, our children will inherit disaster.
I rather like that.
However, they are starting to make me nervous. They are getting their fingers into way too much stuff in all areas of life. Kind of like what MS tried to do in the 90s. They had limited success, got a lot of enemies, and are going downhill now. Google will get further because so far people sort of trust them, but that could be a problem in of itself. Maybe it's time people stopped trusting them and started keeping a close eye on them.
Their in that precarious position of turning from "fighting the man" to "being the man", so to speak. :-)
US should be happy when the "talented folks" on the other coast are ripping it apart with bail-outs and bonuses, at least the West Coast's elite are feeling the need to rectify the systematic problems, even if it is only a drop in the bucket.
I wish Google success in playing a role in resolving the energy crisis.
And the fact that they own all that dark fiber that is worth a whole lot more than when they bought it gets ominous.
Tack on the smartphone thing and if they're not careful, Google is going to get to be big and successful.
THE PIRATES OF DAAAARK FIBER!!
Negotiations with China are finally underway and finally the censorship they have foolishly impaired on google.cn has been lifted after all electricity was shut off from the small rebel country for a period of 10 hours.
in other news the State of America has asked once again for amnesty from the all mighty Google empire - though allegations of the small city-state harboring rebel fighters, they may soon join the mighty Google empire in exchange for heavy policing and trade goods, as well as free internet access.
This report brought to you by SHAM-WOW (ads sponsored by ad-sense.)
At somepoint the only thing Google I won't be able to get is a Google job.
http://www.globalwarmingheartland.org/
And Why Won't Al Gore Debate his critics?!:
http://www.globalwarmingheartland.org/_other%20images/NYTHeartland10.30.pdf
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- by YSLGuru March 5, 2010 8:30 AM PST
- If Google worked as hard at protecting the rights of its users and respecting the laws of each Nation especially those of the US (and I mean laws that are constitutionally allowed and not the unconstitutional ones that get enacted and later on accepted thru bogus schemes like the BS precedence tactic often used to bypass inconvenient constitutional limits on governments power) I?d say this was another great move by Google but atlas Google is quickly moving from smart flexible Internet Search Engine to the internet version of what IBM has become; a slow behemoth that is more often than not self-serving.
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (35 Comments)And before any pro-corporate fans criticize that comment you need to think about the fact that while we are a pro-capitalist country we are not a pro-corporation country. Back before the oil barons (I believe it was Rockefeller who did this) paid off enough politicians to get this changed, corporations were not allowed to do business in the US until they proved they would be providing a benefit to the community they would operate in. In addition the corporations license to business was up for renew every 10 years and at that time they would have to show they had provided a benefit to the community and would continue to do so before being allowed to continue to operate and or do business in the US. This was a real inconvenience for people like Rockefeller who had no problem coming in and robbing a community of all its resources and moving on to the next victim. He knew how this constitutionally set limit on corporations would never allow for the type of community pillaging he wanted and so he paid off enough politicians in various states to get the States to change this and the States started issuing business licenses without this kind of limitation. From that point the place of business in America started going downhill.
Just imagine how much better off our country would be if every corporation doing business here would not be allowed to do business in the US unless they showed they were providing a benefit o the communities they operated in? We would not be in the unemployment mess we are. And no this limit with corporations in the early days did not prevent the growth of businesses only the growth of one?s bad for the people who lived and worked in the US.
For the past decade we?ve seen business pillage the us by moving production overseas along with jobs while still selling their goods back to the people whom they fired when the corporation pulled out of the US. If we were still operating as the founding fathers had originally designed we wouldn?t have this mess we do. So do you pledge an allegiance to America and your community or to big-bussiness?