I think they are going in the right direction by investing alot of money to make solar energy competitive to coal and other fossil fuels within years and not decades.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/towards-more-renewable-energy.html
Dana1981
Favorite Answer
I heard about this story on NPR this morning. I think it's very cool that Google is investing money in alternative energy (not just solar, but also wind and geothermal). This will accelerate the developments of these technologies which were already well on their way to becoming cost-competetive with coal.
Good for Google - it's a really cool company.
Rationality Personified
Google is a private for-profit company. The directors and officers have a fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of their shareholders. They are investing in goodwill for their brand name. The statement "investing a lot of money to make solar energy competitive to coal and fossil fuels" belies a misunderstanding of economics. If solar energy is not competitive with other energy sources now, throwing money at solar increases the amount of investment upon which a return must be shown for it to be competitive. If they can come up with new technology that makes solar energy cheap enough to compete with other energy sources, that's fine, but merely putting solar panels on the roof of their headquarters (as Google is reportedly doing) doesn't do much for the competitiveness of solar energy aside from some marginal increase in whatever economies of scale are associated with current solar technology.
John Sol
I'm not surprised, Servers use vast amounts of energy and thier profitability will be effected by rising fuel prices, and so Google's will in turn.
Notice the rhetoric beyond the blog was about price compared with coal, no mention of global warming. It still good, yes, but thier sainthood is all spin. A public company's first legal obligation is to make profits for it's shareholders.
Anonymous
I'm impressed, not by that specific paper, but by the fact that the whole issue of clean energy becomes trendy, so large corporations are going the trend.
such a concentration of minds is bound to make a major change much faster than the petrified politicians believe.
SilentDoGood
It's real, so I'm buying the worlds cleanest car that's coming out in 2008. This car runs on compressed air and cost way less than the hydrogen cars.
Solar is good but don't forget the wind generators.