Google Adsense College

Posted by Dan Reicher, Director,
Climate and Energy Initiatives, Google.org

Today Google.org is launching an
exciting project that offers a glimpse of a smarter energy future:
cars that plug into an electric grid powered by solar energy.
Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (“plug-in hybrids”) can achieve 70
-100 miles per gallon, quadrupling the fuel economy of the average
car on the road today (~20 mpg). As we demonstrated at today’s
event, plug-in hybrids can sell power back to the electric grid
when it's needed most through vehicle-to-grid (V2G)
technology

As you may know, one of Google.org's core missions is to
address climate change. In the U.S., transportation contributes
about one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions –- with more than
60 percent of those emissions coming from personal vehicles. By
accelerating the adoption of plug-in hybrids and vehicle-to-grid
("V2G") technologies, this new project, href="http://www.google.org/recharge/" >RechargeIT.org, aims to
reduce emissions and dependence on oil while promoting clean energy
technologies and increasing consumer choice. Linking the U.S.
transportation system to the electricity grid maximizes the
efficiency of our energy system. From these efforts, we believe the
environment will benefit — and consumers will have more choices to
fuel their cars.

We've been working with Google engineers and href="http://www.hymotion.com/" >Hymotion/ href="http://www.a123systems.com/" >A123Systems to build a small
fleet of plug-in hybrids, adding an external plug and additional
batteries to a regular hybrid car so that it runs on electricity
with gasoline (or even better, biofuels) to extend the driving
range for longer trips. Here's what it looks like:

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Since most Americans drive less than 35 miles per day, you easily
could drive mostly on electricity with the gas tank as a
"safety net." Our goal is to demonstrate the plug-in
hybrid and V2G technology, get people excited about having their
own plug-in hybrid, and encourage car companies to start building
them soon.

In the preliminary results from our test fleet, on average the
plug-in hybrid gas mileage was 30 mpg higher than that of the
regular hybrids. In conjunction with Pacific Gas and Electric, we
also demonstrated the bidirectional flow of electricity through V2G
technology, and have awarded $1 million in grants and announced
plans for a $10 million request for proposals (RFP) to fund
development, adoption and commercialization of plug-ins, fully
electric cars and related vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology.
(Here's the href="http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/rechargeit_20070618.html" >
full release.)

As for Google Inc., today the href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/corporate-solar-is-coming.html" >
solar panel installation we announced last October is now
producing clean, renewable electricity for our Mountain View, CA
headquarters.

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The system will offset peak electricity consumption at the solar
powered offices and the newly constructed solar carports have
charging stations for the plug-in hybrids. At 1.6 megawatts — with
an electricity output capable of powering approximately 1,000
average California homes — the Google project is the largest solar
installation on any corporate campus in the U.S. to date, and one
of the largest on any corporate site in the world. To see how much
electricity these panels are producing right now, visit our new href="http://www.google.com/corporate/solarpanels" >performance
monitoring site.

To learn more about the initiative, we encourage you to explore the
rest of href="http://www.google.org/recharge/" >RechargeIT.org. And to
see what others are saying about plug-in hybrids and V2G
technology, be sure to watch this video.

Tags: , climate, Dan, Director, Energy, Initiatives, Posted, Reicher

Posted by Bill Weihl, Green Energy
Czar

Reducing climate change by saving energy is an important effort we
should all join, and that's why we're very glad to see the
innovative thinking going into a variety of solutions. One idea,
suggested by the site called "Blackle" (which is not
related to Google, by the way, though the site does use our href="http://www.google.com/coop/cse/" >custom search engine),
is to reduce energy used by monitors by providing search with a
black background. We applaud the spirit of the idea, but our own
analysis as well as that of href="http://blogs.wsj.com/numbersguy/does-a-darkened-google-really-save-electricity-104/" >
others shows that making the Google homepage black will not
reduce energy consumption. To the contrary, on flat-panel monitors
(already estimated to be 75% of the market), displaying black may
actually increase energy usage. href="http://techlogg.com/content/view/360/31/" >Detailed
results from a new study confirm this.

As computers become a bigger part of more people's lives, they
will consume an increasing amount of energy, which is why we've
invested so much in href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/towards-more-efficient-computing.html" >
making our data centers efficient and we've

href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/climate-savers-computing-initiative.html" >
joined with others to launch Climate Savers Computing, which
has a goal of reducing total power consumption by more than 50% for
all computers by 2010.

There are some things you can do now to reduce
the energy used by your computer, such as:

turn on the power management features. Virtually all computers
today have the ability to switch into low-power modes automatically
when they're idle; very few computers have this capability
enabled! href="http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/learnmore/russel_02march25.mspx" >
Here's how to do it on computers running Windows XP.

turn off your monitor and computer when you're not using
them

turn down the brightness on your monitor

make sure your next computer meets the efficiency standards of
href="http://www.climatesaverscomputing.org/" >Climate Savers
Computing (an efficient computer uses up to 50% less energy
than a conventional one)

to find the most efficient PCs available today, look for the
words "EnergyStar 4.0 compliant."

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Tags: , Bill, climate, CzarReducing, Energy, Green, Posted, Weihl