Since the company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998, Google has come to be known as one of the biggest organisations in the world, and in the online world, certainly the biggest.

Beginning as the Google search engine, the company – due to the success of the search engine, which controls a majority of all search traffic on the net – has expanded in several areas, creating Google Maps, Google Books, Google Earth and Google Street View, plus several advertising solutions that can be found all over the net.

Expanding in the online world, though, is not enough for a company whose value is greater than many small countries. Now Google are making plans to enter into green technology, an area that they feel is not being investigated thoroughly enough, or quickly enough.

Google’s Bill Weihl, discussing plans for a mirror based solar power system, told the Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit that,

“We’ve been looking at very unusual materials for the mirrors both for the reflective surface as well as the substrate that the mirror is mounted on…Typically what we’re seeing is $2.50 to $4 a watt (for) capital cost…So a 250 megawatt installation would be $600 million to a $1 billion. It’s a lot of money…We’re not there yet. I’m very hopeful we will have mirrors that are cheaper than what companies in the space are using…In two to three years we could be demonstrating a significant scale pilot system that would generate a lot of power and would be clearly mass manufacturable at a cost that would give us a levelized cost of electricity that would be in the 5 cents or sub 5 cents a kilowatt hour range“.

Being a company known for their trendiness and an organisation associated with modernity, its something of a coup for the green technology industry that the seemingly omnipresent Google are deciding to invest time, effort and  – most importantly – money and media attention, to their cause.

Its a sign that green technology is something in which people wish to be seen to be involved, certainly, and a sign that the move of green technology into mainstream society and pop culture continues.

Source: The Independent