Filed under: Official Google Blog — Wrote by Lees on Sunday, May 4th, 2008 @ 2:31 am
Posted by Sonal Shah, Head of Global
Development Initiatives, Google.org and Bob Boorstin, Washington
Director of Policy Communications
Last month, Google and Google.org hosted more than 80 technology
decisionmakers from international development non-profits for an
interactive discussion at our Washington D.C. office. Over lunch,
case study presentations and hands-on sessions, participants
discussed the ways technology is changing the landscape of
international development — and how to take advantage of new tools
for fundraising, communication, data visualization, and online
collaboration.
Speakers highlighted the benefits of
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing" id="h9x4" >cloud
computing and demonstrated how to display data on maps and
interactive graphs with products like
href="http://www.google.com/earth/outreach/" id="um5h" >Google
Earth and
href="http://www.gapminder.org/world/" id="zj2i" >Trendalyzer. A
representative from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum discussed
how the Museum created a
href="http://www.ushmm.org/maps/projects/darfur/" id="k5to"
>Darfur layer on Google Earth that gives
"publicly accessible evidence of destruction to help visually
refute claims of minimal collateral damage from war." The
YouTube breakout session explored how cheap video cameras paired
with an on-the-ground presence can help document and spread
awareness of ongoing crises abroad. Participants even made their
own videos to talk about how the Internet is changing the
development world:
Special thanks to our friends at the
href="http://www.theirc.org/" id="ycg4"
>International Rescue
Committee,
>MercyCorps, and the
href="http://www.ushmm.org/" id="homs"
>U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum for sharing stories of their experiences in taking
advantage of new technologies. For those who are interested,
we're posting the
href="http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=0C7A75D936163C8C"
id="pafl" >presentations on YouTube.
We hope that this event will be the first of many discussions,
workshops, and other public events we hold with non-profits in our
new D.C. space.
Filed under: Official Google Blog — Wrote by Lees on Tuesday, December 11th, 2007 @ 6:18 am
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:
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.
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.
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alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5077462773312724226"