News - Google funds clean energy

SAN FRANCISCO - Google aims to do for the power grid what it did for the Internet. Once conquered the market for Web search simplifying the process and making sales of related advertising more efficient, Google is now funding green technology and is using its brand power to lobby for political change. The search engine on Wednesday unveiled a plan in 2030 to U.S. away from dependence on fossil fuels to generate power and reduce fuel use for cars by 40 percent. That will cost trillions of dollars, but Google believes it will ultimately save money. CEO Eric Schmidt said in any way the annual cost of the energy plan would be less than the 700,000 billion being considered to save the financial industry, and established some parallels between the energy challenge and the credit crunch. "It's an excessive failure of system design," he said. "It is inconceivable to me that the sum of the financial industry may have created it as a possible outcome." Schmidt said Google had not yet felt the impact of the crisis, but added it is hard to predict what will happen. "There is a problem on the same scale in energy," he told reporters after a speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco entitled "Where would Google drill?". Through its subsidiary philanthropic Google.org, the company is supporting initiatives designed wind technologies, solar and geothermal, hoping that will eventually be cheaper than coal. Google invested $ 45 million in such companies this year. "But that's a drop when we need a flood," Google wrote on its official blog.