Google Invests in Enhanced Geothermal System
Google.org, the philanthropic wing of the company, announced last week that it will invest $10 million into Enhanced Geothermal Systems, a promising and overlooked alternative energy.
As far as what’s needed to make EGS a part of our energy infrastructure, $10M is peanuts, but that a for-profit organization like Google.org is willing to invest in it is good news. The proponents of EGS seem to be making the claim that the costs will greatly decrease if only they can put more of these in the ground, perhaps taking advantage of economies of scale. In turn, that might make energy costs for EGS competitive. What’s needed is an up-front funder who can afford to take the risk, e.g., Google.org.
This is a good example of how the private sector can find and support alternative energy innovations, though it should be no surprise that anyone with an idea for cheap and clean energy will attract investors. It does, however, conflict with the notion that the government should be the one leading us to technological salvation, most popularly illustrated in Thomas Friedman’s call for a Manhattan Project for alternative energy. In reality, what does such government funding get us? Ethanol. Or to pick an even less practical, go-nowhere technology, hydrogen fuel cells. Rich Sweeney puts it in perspective:
The fantastic MIT EGS Report estimates that a modest investment of $300 million over the next 10 years could lead to EGS contributing 10% of baseload electricity by 2050. According to Romm, wewastespend that amount on hydrogen fuel cell research every year.
How easy do you think it will be to take that $300M away from its current recipients? How easy will it be for Google.org to invest in someone else next year if EGS doesn’t pan out?
I really wish that the right would get around to growing out of this knee-jerk GOVMINT BAD!! GOVMINT BAD!! fetish. The track-record of government-funded research is pretty darn good, and there’s lots of technologies that we currently value highly that we just plain wouldn’t have without it. I know that it seems to burn your butts that this is so, but nonetheless: there are lots of things that just aren’t going to get done without the government taking an active part in them. Now, that we should structure government funding of research in a competitive way is an important insight of conservative thought in the 20th century; but it’s one that’s already well-established.
To flip Zach’s question around, look at how remarkable it is that a company as cash-flush as google is deciding to put a mere $10M towards a particular research program — where will the other $290M come from in the first place? And if it turns out that geothermal takes too long to start paying off, how long do you think google.org will keep the cash spigot open, especially if it faces a few tight quarters in a row? Again, there are kinds of large-scale and long-term investments that you just have to government involved in. And just as you can find cases in which the government makes bad picks, you can also find cases of large, established business interests using their muscle to shut down might-be promising alternative products. Neither private nor public by itself can do what we want done; we need both. Democrats learned the importance of the private sector a long time ago; I wish that Republicans would hurry up & learn the importance of the public* already.
I am frankly nonplussed by your snipe at fuel cell technology, which seems to me to be something that we’re still very much in the process of exploring and developing. Lots and lots of folks, not just in the government, have thought it a technology worth investing in. It’s not at all obvious to me that it is a “go-nowhere” technology, but even if it is, that was something that had to be learned by spending lots of private and public moneys on it.
Conventional geothermal may work out for Google. Even $300m is trivial for them since it would be spread over several years.
I hope we do definitively test geothermal. If it works well that will be good. If it doesn’t prove useful then at least we will know.
But if you want something that works subsidize ground-sink heat pumps. Absolutely the best way to cut electricity consumption for millions of homes. And they save the most when weather conditions are most extreme, hot or cold.
Alas, ground sinks aren’t new or untried. They aren’t very expensive. That is just dull. Better that we fund any scheme remotely likely to produce energy ratherthan promote known ways to cut energy use.
Asking the right to “grow out of the government bad fetish” is equivalent to asking libertarians to not believe in individual rights. It is impossible to do and is almost fundamental to the individual beliefs involved. For the record, I consider myself conservative, and will probably always believe that government is bad.
That being said, there is a significant difference between government as a provider of infrastructure and development …think Eisenhower’s roads program and the military’s involvement in the creation of the internet (with Al Gore’s help) compared to government as regulation and entitlements. The DMV and Sarbanes Oxley are two of the worst examples of government as regulation, and those programs make life less productive for all.
I am curious about this google.org company. “Philanthropic” companies are typically not-for-profit, and normally do not have shareholders. However, I am not sure if google.org is a not-for-profit company since I couldn’t find the company listed on the california secretary of state’s website.
In the alternative, is google.org just a part of the huge Google corporation? If so, the use of company resources to address the “global challenges of our age” as defined on the google.org webpage could actually be considered to be an improper investment of the money of the google shareholders under the “business judgment rule.” If the company has a profit motive, they are ok, but the profit motive is usually at odds with the word “philanthropic.”
Phil, this might be why you don’t hear about companies making this type of investment very often.
“Asking the right to “grow out of the government bad fetish” is equivalent to asking libertarians to not believe in individual rights. It is impossible to do and is almost fundamental to the individual beliefs involved.”
That sounds about right, but there’s a key asymmetry there that perhaps reveals why libertarians have been able to remain intellectually respectable even while main conservative political party seems to have nothing to run on except, as Sullivan recently termed it, “smears and fear”.
The asymmetry is this: the core libertarian ideal identified there is an ethical & normative one, not a descriptive one. As such, it is fairly immune to empirical refutation. But right-wing gov-phobia is more often based on a contingent, causal, empirical premise, something along the lines of “the more we keep the government out of things, then the more & better we’ll get of what we want & need”. And for most Americans, this empirical claim has turned out to be badly false. Good, pragmatic policy has turned out not to be a matter of good central command-and-control planning; but neither has it turned out to be a matter of wild laissez-faire-ism. What the left has been learning, and the right needs to catch up on, is how to use both government & the market together.
This technology resembles ocean thermal energy conversion–a technology I’ve been intrigued by for years.
I just want to see what happens when two hydrogen fuel cell cars crash into each other.
Also, word is that GE (?) patented a method to convert ammonia to nitrogen gas and water with no by-products using a Stirling engine about 20-30 years ago.