Google surfs alt.energy wave
Google is planning to put some of its vast fortune behind alternative energy technologies, according to this Reuters report.
“The Internet search giant, which has said it will invest in researching green technologies and renewable-energy companies, is eager to help promising technologies amass scale to help drive the cost of alternative energy below the cost of coal.
“There are a lot of technologies that get to the pilot scale and look promising, but the first few large commercial projects deploying those technologies, financing those can be extremely difficult,” Dan Reicher said in an interview at the Clean-tech Investor Summit in Indian Wells, California.
“Often the usual equity and debt players will say come back to us when you’ve demonstrated this at scale,” said Reicher, director of climate and energy initiatives for Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org.
The stage between successfully developing a new technology and amassing scale is often referred in the industry as the “Valley of Death,” Reicher said.
Venture capital firms typically pour tens of millions into developing new technologies, Reicher said. But that’s not nearly enough to build a utility-scale solar thermal plant, for instance, and that’s where Google thinks it can be helpful, he added.”