Google's Schmidt Clarifies the Company's "2030" Energy Plan

(MoneyWatch)  Google CEO Eric Schmidt more clearly outlined the search giant's alternative energy plan to get the U.S. off the teat of fossil fuels and help clean up the environment by 2030 last night a meeting of the Commonwealth Club of California in downtown San Francisco.

Why do Schmidt and Google have an energy plan? Well, who doesn't? T. Boone Pickens has one. So does Al Gore. And so do Bill Gates, President Bush, John McCain and Barack Obama. And so does the Sierra Club, Set America Free and the Apollo Alliance, to name a few.

Google plans is different, but not that much, except that it costs $1 trillion less than Al Gore's and unlike, say, Pickens, Google is not heavily invested in the resources and technologies that it says will produce the desired outcome-- yet, anyway.

The Clean Energy 2030 plan calls for:

• Reducing reliance on coal, natural gas and nuclear
• Growing wind from next-to-nothing to 29 percent, growing geothermal to 15 percent and advancing solar to 12 percent
• Selling more hybrid cars (from about 100,000 in 2010 to more than 20 million by 2030)

Schmidt said that the energy expert whiz kids down at the Google campus in Mountain View think that the plan, if implemented, would reduce dependence on oil by 88 percent and produce 95 percent fewer carbon emissions.

The cost? $4.4 trillion in today's money but, said Schmidt, the U.S. would save $1 trillion over the life of the plan as clean alternatives become cheaper.

Or maybe Google should just use its search technology to find more oil. (OK, just kidding.)
For more detail, see Google's Clean Energy 2030 plan at Google.org.