OK before you think this is some kinda spice girl blog entry, by gPower I mean Google generating power. I read this very interesting article yesterday and was almost surprised. Well almost, I guess when it’s Google you can’t be too surprised with anything really.

Search giant Google on Tuesday pledged to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make renewable energy cheaper than coal.

Though I admire them for their efforts, what Google has set out to do is a tall order. Even with it’s millions in research, to generate 1Gigawatt of power and that too cheaper than coal will be very difficult indeed. Using coal to generate power is pretty inefficient way to generate power not to mention the huge pollutants coal spews out. However coal is so darn cheap, the power produced still turns out to be cheaper than most other methods of power generation.

What is interesting is the fact that Google is looking at a possible way to get power from geothermal energy along with other traditional ways of renewable power generation like solar and wind. Power from the belly of the earth itself! Cool! However to achieve this could involve considerable research, which obviously Google is prepared for.

With geothermal energy, or “heat mining,” electricity is generated from hot rocks thousands of feet beneath the Earth’s surface. Water is flowed into drilled wells, creating a heat exchanger that can produce hot water or steam to run electrical generators on the surface. — MIT

They say necessity is the mother of invention and it’s time someone really cut through the red-tape and hypocritical b.s. of politicians and power generation companies and really looked at power generation from a totally different angle. Google is probably doing it right. How the whole thing turns out is a different story, they may succeed or they may fail, but at least they are trying, which is more than what some governments and politicians are willing to do.

Go Google!