Following up on "Google Partners With SolarCity On $750 Million Residential Solar Fund (SCTY; GOOG)" where we reiterated, the money is in the finance, not the manufacturing.
Since 2007 I've been recommending Professor David J.C. MacKay, who used to hang his hat at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, where as best as I can tell, they manufacture physics laureates for the Nobel folks. (29 at last count).
He has a bunch of letters after his name.
Mackay left the lab in 2013 to be the University's first Regius Professor of Engineering but remains Chief Scientific Advisor to Great Britain's Department of Energy and Climate Change.
Here's his Cambridge website.
When people want to talk energy with me I usually ask if they have read his book.
Finally, here is the new download page.
If you've read the book you understand some of the challenges.
Alternatively here are a couple of the engineers who helped spearhead the GOOGs efforts writing for the brainiacs at IEEE Spectrum:
What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change
Ross Koningstein and David Fork are engineers at Google, who worked together on the bold renewable energy initiative known as RE < C .
They dedicate this article to the memory of Tim Allen, who led the project. Allen inspired them to question their assumptions about what it would take to reverse climate change. “He wasn’t married to one approach,” Koningstein says. “He was intent on solving the problem.”
Google cofounder Larry Page is fond of saying that if you choose a harder problem to tackle, you’ll have less competition. This business philosophy has clearly worked out well for the company and led to some remarkably successful “moon shot” projects: a translation engine that knows 80 languages, self-driving cars, and the wearable computer system Google Glass, to name just a few.
Starting in 2007, Google committed significant resources to tackle the world’s climate and energy problems. A few of these efforts proved very successful: Google deployed some of the most energy-efficient data centers in the world, purchased large amounts of renewable energy, and offset what remained of its carbon footprint.
Google’s boldest energy move was an effort known as RE, which aimed to develop renewable energy sources that would generate electricity more cheaply than coal-fired power plants do. The company announced that Google would help promising technologies mature by investing in start-ups and conducting its own internal R&D. Its aspirational goal: to produce a gigawatt of renewable power more cheaply than a coal-fired plant could, and to achieve this in years, not decades.
...MUCH MORE
