What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change—Today’s renewable energy technologies won’t… [View all]

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http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change

[font face=Serif][font size=5]What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change[/font]
[font size=4]Today’s renewable energy technologies won’t save us. So what will?[/font]

By Ross Koningstein & David Fork
Posted 18 Nov 2014 | 20:00 GMT

[font size=3]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<C, 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.

Unfortunately, not every Google moon shot leaves Earth orbit. In 2011, the company decided that RE<C was not on track to meet its target and shut down the initiative. The two of us, who worked as engineers on the internal RE<C projects, were then forced to reexamine our assumptions.

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