GoogleEngineers Explain Why They Stopped R&D in Renewable Energy
In 2007, when Googleunveiledits initiative to make renewableenergy competitive with coal, called RE<C, it represented a majorbreakthrough for the industry.
The tech giant saidit was prepared to invest tens of millions of dollars to boost emerging solar,wind and geothermal technologies in order to rival the economics of coal. Theinitiative was unprecedented for a company of its type and put it in the sameleague with GE, which had undertaken its own ambitious multi-billion-dollareffort years earlier, ecomagination, to commercialize emerging clean energytechnologies.
Then, in 2011,Google stopped its R&D efforts prematurely. It appeared the company wasmore bullish on the deployment of renewables, not on spending lots of money onR&D. In the years since, Google hasinvested more than $1 billiondirectly in solar and windprojects.
You’d thinkthe thrill might wear off this whole renewable energy investing thing after awhile. Nope -- we’re still as into it as ever, rejoiced the companyin a blog postlast fall.
The company has nowprocured enough renewable energy and efficiency tooffsetits carbon emissions. Meanwhile, thelevelized cost of renewableshas come downtorival the cost of building new coal plants.
So did Google justsee the trend line early and pull the plug on unnecessary investments?
Actually, it was theopposite.
Two Google engineerswho worked on the RE<C initiative have finally opened up about why the teamhalted their efforts. And it wasn't because they thought existing renewableswere enough to decarbonize the global economy.
Trying tocombat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologiessimply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach, wroteGoogle's Ross Koningstein and David Fork ina piece published yesterdayin IEEE's Spectrum.
It's a strikingadmission from a company that has relentlessly supported the growth ofrenewable energy.
When Google firstset out on its mission, the RE<C team was convinced that existing renewables(or those close to commercialization) could reduce emissions enough to avoidthe worst climate change scenarios. But by 2011, when engineers realized thattheir investments were not playing out as expected, they ditched the programand set out to rethink its goals.
As wereflected on the project, we came to the conclusion that even if Google andothers had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, thatswitch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxideemissions, wrote Koningstein and Fork.
The team came tothat conclusion after examining different scenarios for renewable energypenetration using a low-carbon modeling tool from the consulting firm McKinsey.They compared those scenarios to former NASA scientist James Hansen'sfamous 2008 modelshowing that a 350 ppm emissions levelwas needed to stabilize the climate.
They didn't findpromising results:
We decided to combine our energy innovation study’sbest-case scenario results with Hansen’s climate model to see whether a 55percent emission cut by 2050 would bring the world back below that 350-ppmthreshold. Our calculations revealed otherwise. Even if every renewable energytechnology advanced as quickly as imagined and they were all applied globally,atmospheric CO2 levels wouldn’t just remain above 350 ppm; they wouldcontinue to rise exponentially due to continued fossil fuel use. So ourbest-case scenario, which was based on our most optimistic forecasts forrenewable energy, would still result in severe climate change, with all itsdire consequences: shifting climatic zones, freshwater shortages, erodingcoasts, and ocean acidification, among others. Our reckoning showed thatreversing the trend would require...radical technological advances in cheapzero-carbon energy, as well as a method of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestering the carbon.
Those calculations cast our work at Google’s RE<Cprogram in a sobering new light. Suppose for a moment that it had achieved themost extraordinary success possible, and that we had found cheap renewableenergy technologies that could gradually replace all the world’s coal plants --a situation roughly equivalent to the energy innovation study’s best-casescenario. Even if that dream had come to pass, it still wouldn’t havesolved climate change. This realization was frankly shocking: Not only hadRE<C failed to reach its goal of creating energy cheaper than coal, but thatgoal had not been ambitious enough to reverse climate change.
So what does thatmean for Google's strategy?
Koningstein and Forkhint at one possible focus: technologies like power electronics that canefficiently control the grid and enable higher penetrations of distributedgeneration. In July, Googleunveiled a $1 million challengeto build an inverter one-tenth thesize of existing devices.
Unfortunately, most of today’s clean generationsources can’t provide power that is both distributed and dispatchable. Solarpanels, for example, can be put on every rooftop, but can’t provide power ifthe sun isn’t shining. Yet if we invented a distributed, dispatchable powertechnology, it could transform the energy marketplace and the roles played byutilities and their customers. Smaller players could generate not onlyelectricity but also profit, buying and selling energy locally from one anotherat real-time prices. Small operators, with far less infrastructure than autility company and far more derring-do, might experiment more freely and comeup with valuable innovations more quickly.
The engineers stopshort of advocating for specific technology investments such as advancednuclear. Instead, they call for a 70-20-10 approach to pursuingtechnology development similar to the one Google has implemented.
Incremental improvements to existing technologiesaren’t enough; we need something truly disruptive to reverse climate change.What, then, is the energy technology that can meet the challenging costtargets? How will we remove CO2 from the air? We don’t have the answers. Thosetechnologies haven’t been invented yet. However, we have a suggestion for howto foster innovation in the energy sector and allow for those breakthroughinventions.
Consider Google’s approach to innovation, which issummed up in the 70-20-10 rule espoused by executive chairman Eric Schmidt. Theapproach suggests that 70 percent of employee time be spent working on corebusiness tasks, 20 percent on side projects related to core business, and thefinal 10 percent on strange new ideas that have the potential to be trulydisruptive.
Wouldn’t it be great if governments and energycompanies adopted a similar approach in their technology R&D investments?The result could be energy innovation at Google speed. Adopting the 70-20-10rubric could lead to a portfolio of projects. The bulk of R&D resourcescould go to existing energy technologies that industry knows how to build andprofitably deploy. These technologies probably won’t save us, but they canreduce the scale of the problem that needs fixing. The next 20 percent could bededicated to cutting-edge technologies that are on the path to economicviability. Most crucially, the final 10 percent could be dedicated to ideasthat may seem crazy but might have huge impact. Our society needs to fundscientists and engineers to propose and test new ideas, fail quickly, and sharewhat they learn. Today, the energy innovation cycle is measured in decades, inlarge part because so little money is spent on critical types of R&D.
The piece does notsay whether Google intends to follow its own advice and develop a similarapproach to investing in next-generation energy technologies. Indeed, thecompany has taken a somewhat incremental, deployment-heavy strategy itself inthe wake of the failure of the RE<C by focusing on driverless cars,conventional renewable energy procurement and home automation through itsacquisition of Nest.
But Koningstein andFork had a blunt message about their experience: With 20/20 hindsight, wesee that it didn’t go far enough.
Source: http://www.greentechmedia.com/