Clean Energy: Technology, Policy and Finance

Dan Reicher
Director of Climate and Energy Initiatives
Google.org

Abstract

This Forum will cover Google’s work on energy and climate change, with emphasis on the company’s green initiatives:

• Renewable Electricity Cheaper than Coal (RE<C) which is working to lower the cost of solar, wind and geothermal energy through engineering, investment, policy and information.
• PowerMeter which is a product Google is developing to provide people with real time on-line information about home energy use
• RechargeIT which has developed and is testing a fleet of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and also advancing supportive policy measures.

Mr. Reicher will also talk about the more than $50B for clean energy in the recent federal stimulus package which he helped develop as member of President Obama’s transition team.

Overview

• 3 elements needed for sustainable energy future: technology, policies, finance
• $50 billion stimulus for energy
• Challenge is how to spend money wisely
• Lost: National RPS, renewable energy transmission, national energy efficiency standard
• Cap and Trade is more politically viable and the way the administration is going
• SMUD looking into make usage data available to compare to other users

PowerMeter

• Focus is inwards from power meter
• Hooked up to smart meter, or clips on fuse box
• Data ends up on laptop or cell phone, or data display box
• Open source to encourage 3rd party apps
• Smarter grid: real-time info, consumers own data, free access, open standards
• Benefits: save energy and money, ecosystems of products/services
• 200 Google employees trying this out
• Can discover how much appliances use and how much used per day, comparison to other users
• Just providing people with data allows simple changes in behavior to save 5% to 15%
• Efficiency investments can produce 20% to 40% savings
• Next step, appliances talk to grid, demand response
• One Googler’s experience: took out extra refrig and did other savings, 44% power savings, 56% reduction in monthly cost
• Refrigerator success story: size going up, efficiency and cost going down
• Planning on enhancing PowerMeter for appliance control
• Considering monitors for individual appliances or software analysis so the system teaches itself
• Utilities putting in smart meters to reduce need to send someone to read them, but not necessarily to provide info to consumers

RechargeIT

• Electrifying transportation
• Priuses and Ford Escapes, converted over to plug-in hybrid. Hymotion lithium
• Grid stabilization for energy storage. Wind blows at night and could be used for charging
• Experimenting with smart charging
• Real data: 73.5 MPG, 129 Wh/mile (average Prius gets 45 MPG)
• Simulations showed plug-ins achieving: Prius 93.5 MPG, Escape 49.1. MPG

RE<C

• Renewable electricity cheaper than coal
• Renewable energy still can’t compete straight up with coal
• internal R&D
• Fund external R&D
• Investments in companies with breakthrough technologies
• Address policy barriers

Geothermal

• Enhanced geothermal Systems (EGS) (used to be HDR hot dry rock)
• Costs going less than 4 cents kWh
• Base load power
• Scalable projects larger than 500 MW
• No scientific show stoppers
• Heavy commercialization risk: innovation, site viability, drilling, not yet commercially proven, inadequate government support
• Two EGS plants operational, both less than 10 MW in size in Germany and France. Australian also rapidly developing EGS
• Potential:
  • Shallow identified hotter than 90C: 30,00 MW
  • Shallow unidentified hotter than 150C: 120,000 MW
  • Co produced and geo-pressurized: greater than 100,000 MW potential

Where is EGS Possible?

• US potential
  • At 3.5 km EGS possible in tens of thousands of MW
  • At 6.5 KM 100s thousands MW
  • At 10km millions of MW (in almost all of US)
• Nevada has a lot of EGS at 5.5 km
• Texas lot at 6.5 km. 178,000 MW with 2% recovery, 1,777,000 MW with 20% recovery
• Big issues:
  • surface plants: reducing drilling and exploration costs, educe parasitic losses, reduce materials costs
  • Drilling costs
• Geothermal got $400 million dollars from ARRA (was $10 million before)

Gap Minder? For electricity and savings usage?