Can Google save the planet?
With the announcement that it was proposing a $4.4 trillion plan to get the U.S. off of fossil fuels by 2030, Google joined the ranks of Al Gore and T. Boone Pickens, as those providing desperately needed private leadership to address the problems of climate change and our failing energy policy.
Google, which uses tremendous amounts of energy to power its servers, has (through it’s philanthropic unit Google.org) put together a comprehensive plan that would fundamentally shift the way our country generates energy. According to the proposal’s architect, Jeffrey Greenblatt, “Technologies and know-how to accomplish this are either available today or are under development.”
The major proposals of the plan include:
- Deploying aggressive end-use efficiency measures to reduce electricity demand by 33%.
- Replacing all coal and oil electricity generation, and about half of that from natural gas, with renewable electricity. With the major sources being wind, solar, and geothermal.
- Increasing plug-in vehicles (hybrids & pure electrics) to 90% of new car sales in 2030, reaching 42% of the total US fleet that year.
- Increasing new conventional vehicle fuel efficiency from 31 to 45 mpg in 2030 and accelerating the turnover of the vehicle fleet from 19 to 13 years (resulting in 25 million new (and therefore cleaner) vehicle sales per year in 2030, a 31% increase over current numbers).
To achieve these goals, the plan asserts, among other things, that the country will have to substantially upgrade our electric grid’s transmission capacity and must invest in research to make renewable energy economically competitive with fossil fuels. Stricter mileage standards for cars must be imposed, and infrastructure for electric vehicles, like charging stations must be built.
According to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, “we have seen a total and complete failure of leadership in the political parties of the United States,” he said in a speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco yesterday, noting, “we’ve been working on a plan to help solve this problem.”
Schmidt, who is also an adviser to Sen. Obama, indicated that he prefers Obama’s energy plans over McCain’s. ”The Obama program is more in line with the one I’m describing.” Schmidt added that offshore drilling, although a contentious topic in this election, will satisfy only a tiny fraction of the nation’s needs.
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