News about Solar, Wind and alternative green power technologies

Internet monstrosity Google has taken the plunge into renewable energy in a large way, becoming involved in projects such as solar power generating plants. One of these ventures is with an Israeli solar energy company that Google has invested with named BrightSource Energy. They have come up with an array of specifically designed mirrors along with a power generation tower that are the top in the solar energy production industry. It has been known for some time that Google has had it eye on the solar power generation market.

BrightSource has a number of projects on the go right now including in Israel, Nevada and California. It is under contract with Pacific Gas and Electric and will provide over four Gigawatts of electricity  to residential, commercial and businesses in the US and Israel.

BrightSource just claimed a capital investment of one hundred fifteen million dollars, Google made up a part of this. Bill Wheil, the president of Google was a speaker at a global energy summit in San Francisco recently and spoke about how Google was interested in developments in renewable energy that assisted in bring huge quantities of clean energy at a lower expense. He mentioned the distinctive mirrors that BrightSource developed when he addressed the conference participants.

He spoke of how effectual these mirrors were and that they were less expensive than mirrors utilized at competing energy businesses. During his speech, he said Google had been observing some different kinds of materials for se with the mirrors for reflective panels and the substrate that holds the mirror itself. Even though solar power currently costs more to produce than the normal fossil fuel generated power, Businesses such as BrightSource are trying to reduce the expenditure required to a low of five cents per kilowatt hour, while trying to assist commercial users of electricity like Google to decrease their cost of power by up to sixty percent.

BrightSource launched its first solar energy project in the Negev desert in a place called Rotem. Now they are actively working on others including an array set up in Needles, California, which, is one of the warmest places in the United States during the summer time with temperatures rising up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit or fifty degrees Celsius. This project, when completed, will produce electricity for over one hundred and forty thousand residences and drop CO² discharge by over four hundred fifty thousand tons annually.

Google has been a green energy conscious corporate citizen for a few years to this point in their existence and has wanted to decrease their own carbon footprint and at the same time show a responsibility to the possibility of a world with a pristine environment using clean energy. Both Wheil and Google are excited by solar energy and its position as a future energy generator while doing so in an environmentally friendly manner.

Wheil claims that over the next few years, start up projects like these currently taking place are going to manufacture green electricity at about five cents or less per kilowatt hour. So from the Internet and intelligent web searching to producing clean and inexpensive energy. Google may be just the company to take it mainstream.