Dan Reicher, Director of Climate Change and Energy Initiatives, Google, Inc spoke to a packed audience of 300-500 who were looking for insights.  Dan, who is also a co-chairman of the American Council of Renewable Energy (ACORE), was part of Obama’s transition team and seemed to have had some real influence in the energy provisions within the Stimulus Bill.  After decades of working to bring real renewable energy to the US, he felt (as did almost all others) that the time has finally come.

Google didn’t share much information that has not previously been reported or known about the company’s interest in energy.  Dan indicated that Google is interested in renewable energy for profit and for goodwill reasons.  They are a big user of power and expect this to increase.  Google’s energy interest are primarily broken down into two areas:

1. RE<C: Renewable energy less than the cost of coal.  Information on this is available through their website.  Dan did point out that they are particularly interested in Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) which is based on MIT research and simplistically means drilling deep enough into solid, hot rock so that steam can be generated.
2. Information:  Given Google’s principal business lines, this is of little surprise.  Recently they announced their effort to provide online software that when incorporated with smart meters, would allow households to evaluate their energy usage and ultimately find ways to change usage behavior.  Changes in behavior would be driven by the end customers interest in reducing consumption or in better understanding the mix of energy used to supply the household during any period of the day.

Anecdotally, Google has found that by simply monitoring household usage and being more conscious, 5% of typical daily kwh could be saved.  Not very scientific, but they were surprised at these findings.  In addition, the effects of simple daily actions in the house now took on more meaning.  It also helped a particular beta tester determine that their pool pump had likely been running non-stop for years.

At this point, Dan opened the discussion up to questions from the audience.  Predictably, questions were all over the place.

Interestingly, when asked about what they might be doing to get utiliites/state regulators to provide time of use rates for households so that their metering software could achieve maximum potential, they agreed that this would be very hard (50 different jurisdictions)  and would likely limit the impact of their software and initiatives.  Simply, with meters, software and time of use rates, households would have the economic incentive to load shift (e.g. drying clothes in the middle of the night).

After the presentation, I spoke with the head of ACORE about this issue and he said there was zero interest by utiltiies and commissions to expand retail choice.  He thought that this would have to be mandated at the federal level… right after the passing of a national renewable portfolio standard.