Your Google searches and YouTube explorations come at a cost – Google uses enough to power a city of 200,000 people, according to its own figures a continuous 260million watts. So no wonder it’s investing into green energy; now over $900million in its clean energy portfolio. With a long-term approach to fuel security and environmental management it recently invested in the solar energy sector (see below), researching ways to solve the greatest puzzle that’s so far thwarted advances in wind and solar energy – how to store the energy when the wind drops and the sun goes down.
The following article tells more on why this tech giant is diversifying away from its traditional field of search engine algorithms and into energy security.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/business/energy-environment/building-storehouses-for-the-suns-energy-for-use-after-dark.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=earth
That challenge seems to be creating an opening for a different form of power, solar thermal, which makes electricity by using the sun’s heat to boil water. The water can be used to heat salt that stores the energy until later, when the sun dips and households power up their appliances and air-conditioning at peak demand hours in the summer.
Two California companies are planning to deploy the storage technology: SolarReserve, which is building a plant in the Nevada desert scheduled to start up next year, and BrightSource, which plans three plants in California that would begin operating in 2016 and 2017. Together, the four projects will be capable of powering tens of thousand of households throughout a summer evening. <more>
