Google drops the axe on its internal renewable energy work | Hacker News Reader

Google drops the axe on its internal renewable energy work

arstechnica.com

52 pointsevo_917 comments

Here is what Google said:

> We will continue our work to generate cleaner, more efficient energy—including our on-campus efforts, procuring renewable energy for our data centers, making our data centers even more efficient and investing more than $850 million in renewable energy technologies.

So they're still investing close to a billion dollar in renewable energy.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/more-spring-cleaning-...

I always thought it'd be funny if it turned out google solved the energy crisis in their 20% time. Imagine how smug they'd be. It'd make apple look pretty stupid.

Even although they make less money than apple by an order of magnitude, i've always felt like google was the more innovative engineering organization. Apple I feel is more of an industrial design organization at heart in all layers.

>Even although they make less money than apple by an order of magnitude,

Google reported revenues of ~30B for FY10, Apple reported ~60B. That's only an order of magnitude in binary.

Even although they make less money than apple by an order of magnitude

Apple makes more money than Google, but no where near an order of magnitude more. It would be more accurate to say they make between 2 and 3 times more (depending on what you call "make money"):

Apple: Revenue = 108.25B, Gross Profit = 43.82B, EBITDA = 35.57B

Google: Revenue = 35.76B, Gross Profit = 18.90B, EBITDA = 13.45B

This is a mistake. Energy is the next/current big challenge, one in need of research (including and especially domestic, for the U.S.). Google retained some of my loyalty by continuing to pursue this, including such research.

Perhaps I'm just taking it personally. Nonetheless, mistake. 1) Google becomes ever more "just a web site company". (Well, and phones that access the web and apps hosted on the web.) 2) Google's starting to throw over its non-web projects the same way it's been discarding its web projects and acquisitions. This pattern may begin to seriously shake others' belief in and commitment to long term investments in their products and technologies, in both areas.

Whatever their future, the blush is off the rose (or however that metaphor's supposed to go), IMO.

Or maybe I'm just pissed that the U.S. cannot manage a coherent "next generation" energy policy, and the last player I had any hope in just got out.

P.S. I guess I should qualify this by saying my opinion is not tne most informed. So, again, this is in the nature of a personal reaction.

Don't despair too much. Once there is actually a viable business proposition for "next generation" energy, it will take off.

Some of us are working full-time on renewable energy projects - my company is one of them. The US may not have a policy in place, but the Senators we have met with are supportive of our efforts, showing us where more general business policies can be helpful to our business.

FYI, the problem with developing renewable energy is not the actual energy production itself. Every inventor out there has a "better" turbine to try, The barriers lie in regulatory limitations and the massive amount of capital needed to build out projects.

I will steal your P.S. for future use.

Because they're shifting resources to google x, expect big announcements on the scale of self driving car from them soon

Clearly this is what we want to hear, but do you know something concrete? Feel free to add teaser dates, vague references to AI, or the word 'space' in your response.

Watch sergey's interview with tim o'reilly on youtube from last week, he mentions that something out of x lab will be coming out by the end of this year. Also, the fact that he's not actively working on google+ and their cutting of previously ambitious projects like energy, google health, etc and the new york times article mentions stanford and nyu, welll known neural network researchers (andrew ng and yann lecunn) means it's probably ai related, probably neural networks applied to computer vision. Space, i probably don't think so.

Of course this is all speculation, i don't have any inside info.

The end of Google health was really sad. A centralized medical records system would be an incredible time and money saver for healthcare.

Although I'd love a self-driving car, and I think it will certainly save a lot of lives.

the spectre of creepiness was probably incompatible with google health.

A centralized medical records system is more political, social and procedural than any sort of technological revolution. The technology to create one has been around for decades.

Funnily enough Microsoft was pushing down the centralised health route a long time back, but gave up because everyone was worried about them holding centralised information. This was back in the days were passport was trying to be rolled out as a single signon solution.

The more things change, the more they stay the same...

It's easy to sink a lot of money into renewables. (Look at our govt) Great that Google didn't have the hubris to chase this too long. Being great at search doesn't mean solving world peace, boiling oceans, or solving the energy crisis.

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