Markets

Google and GE's Clean Tech Initiative: Mere Greenwashing?

By Michael Mattis

Updated on: September 26, 2008 / 5:20 PM EDT / MoneyWatch

Last week, StrategyEye Cleantech reported that Google and General Electric would team up to "support cleantech development and promote policies for renewable energy and sustainable business." GE CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, and Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, announced the alliance at "Zeitgeist," Google's annual gathering of industry heads, journalists and politicos at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Key priorities of the legislative lobbying-aimed effort include the promotion of:

New transmission lines to connect renewable energy projects to the grid
"Smart grid" technology
Enhanced geothermal technology
Hybrid and electric vehicles

But as Bits blogger Miguel Helft noted, the initiative is "in its planning stages and did not have a set budget."

Budget or not, for GE the crux is those first two bullet points. "All this talk about renewable energy will not be realized if we do not build substantial additional transmission capacity," Dan Reicher, director of climate change at Google.org, told the Zeitgeist crowd. That makes sense, because a significant portion of GE's business involves power production, transmission and grid technology. The company is also feeling out opportunities in lower-temperature geothermal and waste heat, and last spring it demonstrated an off-road hybrid power dump truck for use in mining operations.

But Google's core business is search advertising. Isn't all this greenery a distraction from the search behemoth's core business? Google says that it is bent on developing technology to produce "1 gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that is cheaper than coal," an effort the company says should take "years, not decades." Cool, but what's in it for Google shareholders? Maybe the company should take a look at Bill Gates' green crude initiative, which puts profit at the fore.

Never mind. Google's hiring enthusiastic energy engineers and program managers, if you're looking.