“We want to have the ability to procure renewable energy to offset power usage of our operations,” said Niki Fenwick, a Google spokeswoman. Ms. Fenwick said that having access to more renewable energy could help the company fulfill its goal to become “carbon neutral.”

Well that’s what Ms. Fenwick said, but simply procuring renewable energy is probably not the end game here. Here’s why. In Google’s application they have applied to become a power marketer. That means they will be able to buy and sell electricity on the wholesale market. Okay, fine. But check out the following passage from the FERC  filing.

In addition to engaging in sales of electricity that are unregulated by the Commission, Applicant proposes to act as a power marketer, purchasing electricity and reselling it to wholesale customers. Applicant may also engage in other, non-jurisdictional, activities to facilitate efficient trade in the bulk power market, such as arranging services in related areas such as transmission and fuel supplies.

That section of the filing clearly indicates that Google Energy plans to do much more than just purchase renewable energy. They plan to sell energy too. Later on in Section III, Paragraph D of the filing you’ll find the following statement.

Applicant requests authority to sell specified ancillary services that the Commission has authorized market-based entities to sell in the markets operated by…

They go on to list almost all of the organized electricity markets in the U.S. as places where they would like to sell ancillary services. For those not in the know, ancillary services involves providing services, such as energy reserves for example, to the electric grid that help to maintain the stability and security of the grid. We don’t need to delve too much further into the details of that to know that it goes beyond merely providing for Google’s own energy needs.

There are many options for Google Energy with respect to electric market participation if their application is approved by the FERC. It’s true that Google Energy could simply purchase electricity to meet their own needs and do nothing more. But Google could do that without becoming a power marketer. The filed application indicates that Google has even larger aspirations than just purchasing power from the markets. We’ll just have to wait and see.

On September 2nd of this year the New York Times published a story titled, Energy Company Calls Halt to Drilling Project. The main reason the project was halted was due to the fact that AltaRock was unable to drill a sufficient hole, only going down about 800 feet from their starting point of 3,200 feet. In order to move forward the NY Times story states that the drilling needed to reach 12,000 feet. Concerns about the project were already inflated at the time of the shutdown due to the fact that a similar effort in Switzerland had been blamed for an earthquake.

At the time of the original announcement we had our doubts about the viability of the project.

EGS may be indeed be a viable clean energy generation technology. It is also a very a risky and expensive technology that yields its share of negative environmental impacts.

Unfortunately it appears that our instincts were correct. There’s no such thing as a free lunch in power generation. If you want to extract power from the earth the earth makes you pay a heavy price. In this case the price seems to have been too high for AltaRock, their investors and the State of California. AltaRock Energy indicated in their official press release that they continue to seek out other enhanced geothermal projects.

We are continuing with the development of our EGS technology and are currently evaluating a number of alternative well locations, at the Geysers and elsewhere for demonstrating this technology.

You may remember that one time Google turned their home page black in order to help people conserve energy. The only problem with the approach was the fact that computer monitors use the same amount of energy to render a pixel regardless of the color. Google even admits that a black page background, “saves no energy.”

Google’s latest energy saving scheme is just as dubious. They have enlisted a herd of goats to handle the mowing of weeds and brush at Google headquarters. Google calls the goat initiative, “a low-carbon approach” to meeting their needs. Is it really a low-carbon approach?

Consider the fact that the goats need to be transported from their home ranch to Google and back. Our guess is that the truck transporting the goats to and fro runs on diesel fuel. How much fuels is used and how many harmful emissions are created will depend greatly on the travel distance between the home of the goats and Google HQ. At best we think it’s fair to say that it would end up being a wash.

Instead of enlisting goats that will also require care and feeding while onsite, Google should consider investing in the Hustler Zeon which is billed as, “The World’s First All-Electric Zero Turn Riding Mower.”

While this initiative appears to contain more noise than signal Google has made some laudable investments into alternative energy via Google.org with their RechargeIT and Power Meter programs.

While conventional geothermal technology relies on underground caverns that are filled with water or steam to produce energy, EGS technology injects water into dry holes, thus greatly expanding the number of possible sites that may yield power.

A 2005 study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) assessed the possibility of wider EGS development. The MIT study concluded that, “The potential of EGS in evolving U.S. energy markets is large and warrants a comprehensive research and demonstration effort to move this technology to commercial viability”.

The Director of Climate and Energy Initiatives for Google.org says that, “EGS could be the ‘killer app’ of the energy world.” The challenges in developing meaningful production of energy from both standard geothermal and EGS are many though.

The MIT report notes that, “…the main constraint is creating sufficient connectivity within the injection and production well system in the stimulated region of the EGS reservoir to allow for high per well production rates without reducing reservoir life by rapid cooling.” So when you inject water into a dry hole that is hot, the rocks in the hole will get cooler over time. No one seems to know exactly how fast the rocks will cool. This fact raises the possibility that repeated drilling will be necessary in order to continue to exploit the geothermal resources in a particular location.

The impact of the drilling related to EGS is likely to be an issue that limits future development. According the Department of Energy, “Drilling a well and testing the temperature deep underground is the only way to be sure a geothermal reservoir really exists.” So in order to find your resource lots experimental drilling will have to occur. And the holes drilled are thousands of feet deep which means significant time and cost is involved.

The need to inject water presents another potential problem for EGS developers. Where will the water be pumped in from? How much water is needed to maintain production? These questions will be of great concern to the municipalities that govern the lands used in the production of this power.

EGS may be indeed be a viable clean energy generation technology. It is also a very a risky and expensive technology that yields its share of negative environmental impacts.

Those who can’t make it to the conference can view the conference via webcast at http://www.google.org/recharge/dcpluginsconference/index.html.

Description: The conference will place a spotlight on plug-in electric vehicles, examining their potential, their viability, and the pros and cons of different federal policies to promote them.

Date: June 11-12, 2008

Place: Hyatt Regency Capitol Hill, Washington DC

Links: Registration, Agenda, Google Announcement, Brookings Institution

Go to the fleet dashboard and you can find links to the vehicles that are submitting data that can be viewed on the web. I took a detailed look at the Comoe vehicle and was able to see the info below.

You can see a lot more info and look at the data for the other vehicles by going to the RechargeIT site. The key point here is the fact that the technology Google is using may represent the future of hybrid vehicle technology where performance and gas mileage can be stored for later analysis. By analyzing the performance of the vehicle after the fact, drivers or fleet owners may be able to identify engine problems or driving patterns that are reducing the efficiency of the vehicle.

Evidence of Google’s solar array is not hard to find. Using the Google Maps service I was able to zoom in on the headquarters via satellite and inspect the rooftops of their headquarters buildings which indeed are covered with solar panels.

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As a result Google will be investing in wind, solar and plug-in hybrid technology. Here’s a quote from Google’s press release about the plan.

“Lots of groups are doing great work trying to produce inexpensive renewable energy. We want to add something that moves these efforts toward even cheaper technologies a bit more quickly. Usual investment criteria may not deliver the super low-cost, clean, renewable energy soon enough to avoid the worst effects of climate change,” said Dr. Larry Brilliant, Executive Director of Google.org, Google’s philanthropic arm, “Google.org’s hope is that by funding research on promising technologies, investing in promising new companies, and doing a lot of R&D ourselves, we may help spark a green electricity revolution that will deliver breakthrough technologies priced lower than coal.”

This is obviously an exciting development. There’s still a long way to go from here. But it should now be obvious to everyone that clean energy and the technology surrounding it will be the catalysts for the next great wave of innovation coming out of the United States.