Maybe Google doesn’t want to run a wireless voice/data service, but do they really want to be in the utility business?

The search ad company’s philanthropic arm generously plans to hand out hundreds of millions of dollars in investments in developing alternative energy sources. Says Reuters:

“There are a lot of technologies that get to the pilot scale and look promising, but the first few large commercial projects deploying those technologies, financing those can be extremely difficult,” Dan Reicher said in an interview at the Clean-tech Investor Summit in Indian Wells, California.

“Often the usual equity and debt players will say come back to us when you’ve demonstrated this at scale,” said Reicher, director of climate and energy initiatives for Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org.

Google already sent $20 million drifting toward solar-thermal and high altitude wind power startups.

With its multitudes of servers up and running the search engine and other products like Gmail, Google benefits from any advances made in alternative energy developments. Energy costs have sent them and competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft into Washington state to seek hydroelectric power for new server farms.

Posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 2:31 pm. Permalink