A highly visible international project to promote renewable energy has been forced to restate its objectives for addressing climate change through the long term growth of renewables. Starting in 2007, Google set out to see if it couldn’t make a serious contribution to reducing climate change. Several programs were eminently successful: what the company calls some of the most energy-efficient data centers in the world, sourcing large amounts of renewable energy to power them, and offsetting its remaining carbon footprint.
Google’s most ambitious effort was a program it called RE<C, which aimed to develop renewable energy sources that would generate electricity more cheaply than that from coal-fired power plants. Google would help promising technologies mature by investing in start-ups and conducting its own internal R&D. The target was a gigawatt of renewable power generated more cheaply than power from coal, and brought to the market in a matter of years, rather than decades.
As a lengthy article details in the November 18 issue of IEEE Spectrum, written by two of the project’s lead engineers, the program was closed down in 2011 when the company concluded that it could not reach its goal of delivering a technology that could compete economically with coal.
As the authors explain, “At the start of RE<C, we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. ... [But] we came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.”
As Google researchers Ross Koningstein and David Fork explain, they relied on the international scientific community’s estimate that exceeding atmospheric levels of 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide or its equivalent (CO2e) “would likely have catastrophic effects” – given that the world has already breached the 400 ppm level – and found that even a best-case scenario for deployment of renewable energies would fail to bring CO2 below the critical level.
The finding doesn’t mean the planet is doomed, Koningstein and Fork hasten to say: “There’s hope to avert disaster if our society takes a hard look at the true scale of the problem and uses that reckoning to shape its priorities.”
That reckoning, they argue, needs to look at ways to make renewable energy more valuable than coal-fired power; in effect, rather than trying to compete with coal on an apples-to-apples basis, make the bottom line work for the climate by offering something extra, say apples plus. Distributed, dispatchable power can be one of those factors, helping avoid transmission and distribution costs. Financial measures like a carbon tax, to reflect the environmental cost of coal, can also help. Other measures to remove existing carbon from the atmosphere will be needed, such as reforestation and carbon storage. Other technologies that can’t be predicted may emerge with the right incentives. Though they don’t suggest who should be doing the R&D, the authors recommend Google’s approach to innovation: 70% of effort to core tasks, 20% to related side projects, and 10% on “strange new ideas,” any one of which might lead to a breakthrough.
Only private sector involvement, with eager money-making investors, will lead to rapid adoption of a new technology, the authors say. “Each year’s profits must be sufficient to keep investors happy while also financing the next year’s capital investments. With exponential growth in deployment, businesses [in the US] could be replacing 30 gigawatts of installed capacity annually by 2040.”
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