We heard Robert Godes talk last week about Google’s interest in the technology Brillouin Energy is developing, but it looks like the internet giant is still firmly committed to investing in traditional alternative energy. Today the company announced that it will buy the entire 240 megawatt output of a Texas wind energy company, Chermac Energy, which is expected to go online in late 2014.
In a blog post today, Google announced that this deal was made as part of their strategy to power their vast computing enterprise with 100 per cent renewable energy. Google will not use the power directly from the Texas wind farm, but will use this as a way to reduce their carbon footprint and input into the grid clean energy in exchange for power from the grid they are using for their power needs.
Does this give any indication about how interested they are in LENR? Perhaps — but perhaps not. Any company that expects LENR to be an energy source of the future still has to power its operations in the present — and who knows how long it may be before LENR powered electricity is going to be available to use. So maybe they do have hopes for LENR, but are pursuing wind as a short term strategy. On the other hand, if Google was firmly convinced of the future promise of LENR, one might reasonably expect them to be putting a lot of money into supporting it (they have billions of dollars available) since they are so committed to green energy. And to date there is no evidence they have spend anything at all on LENR. Maybe they just haven’t seen enough evidence to get excited about it.