About every two to three weeks now, I get a showstopper of a story, that invites a lot more opinion than most and I'd suggest this is one of them. According to Reuters (albeit, via my Google news aggregator!) . . .
(Well capacity is an easier target to beat in cost terms than load factor and you could probably do that now with onshore wind - more below). Apparently, The project, known as
Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal,
is "
. . .hiring engineers and targeting investment financing at
advanced solar thermal power, wind power technologies, enhanced
geothermal systems and other new technologies" and
" . . . working with its philanthropic arm Google.org, the company
said it plans to spend tens of millions of dollars in 2008 on
research and development and related efforts in renewable
energy".
So here are a few observations;
i) As I wrote earlier in the year
here, Google's founders,
Sergey Brin and Larry Page's much heralded investment in
Nanosolar two years ago is not anything like the success hoped for. Nanosolar must be pretty annoyed not to be included - anywhere - in this latest press release. I think that speaks volumes about the lessons learnt and the desire to diversify out of the non-falling costs of advanced solar pv story.
ii) Spending "Tens of millions of dollars in 2008" is not very much and will be way, way, short of the money they will need to spend on a gigawatt of off the shelf renewable electricity capacity - which would cost by my estimate;
$1.2 billion for onshore wind
$2 billion for offshore wind
$3 billion for geothermal
$5 billion for photovoltaic solar
$4 billion on concentrated solar power
$3 billion on hydropower
iii) Even then, that's nothing like enough money to change the dynamics or to "google" alternative energy. The metrics for the financial success of this ambitious project are just three;
a) the installed cost per watt
b) the levelized cost of those power stations output over 15 years (the typical length of a power purchase agreement)
c) the payback period in years
As I said earlier, the capacity cost of onshore wind is almost certainly cheaper than coal. But the real test is over a given period of time. That's why they need to think of it as a forward purchase of electricity in total gigawatt hours -
relative to US coal. Frankly, a tough order, compared to fully amortised coal. Which makes me think Google might be looking for a spectacular breakthrough, rather than the lowest cost application of the lowest cost renewable energy technology. If that's the case then Google must absolutely stay way clear of anyone who says something like " . . .
just invest enough in my technology to generate a big enough production run and I will easily reduce costs" which has been the graveyard of many investors.
Ok, I've said enough. Except that the odds of Google creating 1 gigawatt of "baseload" renewable electricity ideal for Google's server farms, rather than just setting up a low output gigawatt of intermittent power at lower cost are very slim for the next few years. And we are a long way from this 9 minute, entertaining and rather preposterous film on on youtube - Googlezon !
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