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"Google once brashly believed its engineers could invent a solution to the world's energy problems. These days, the company has a new strategy: finance less risky clean-energy projects where it can actually make an impact.\nLast year, Google invested more than ever in renewable power, spending $880 million to underwrite conventional clean energy projects such as solar panels on California rooftops. But that isn't the role Google envisioned for itself in 2007 when co-founder and current CEO Larry Page declared the search company would get into energy research directly to \"rapidly\" invent cheap ways to generate \"renewable electricity at globally significant scale.\"\nGoogle believed its creativity and innovation would make the difference. It created an in-house plan for how to wean the United States off fossil fuel in 22 years. It posted jobs for engineers who could speed-up design of renewable energy projects, and put a team to work improving the heliostat, a mirrored device that focuses the sun's rays to make thermal energy. Its philanthropy arm, Google.org, began investing in start-ups with far out ideas.\nGoogle's founders were directly involved. One startup, Makani Power, originally planned to move boats using kites, but Page and co-founder Sergey Brin convinced it to pursued high-altitude flying wind turbines, instead. \"They were pretty fearless. They said 'This is a risky thing, we don't know yet if it's going to work out, but we think this has promise,'\" says Makani CEO Corwin Hardham.\nThe company's speedy ways wowed energy experts, as did its goal of producing a gigawatt of renewable electricity at prices competitive with fossil fuels. \"Being at Google, it was fascinating to see how rapidly things could scale. I was enthralled by it,\" says Dan Reicher, Google's former director of climate change and energy initiatives, who left the company in 2010 to head Stanford University's Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance. \"That struck me as a very fundamental difference\u2014the software world measures time frames in months.\" In comparison, he notes, solar panels have been available for 30 years but account for less than one percent of total U.S. electricity production.\nLast November, however, Google killed the program, known as RE"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2012/04/06/google-clean-energy/>