Google CEO Eric Schmidt offers energy plan

Sep 9 , 2008 - Matt Nauman - San Jose Mercury News - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News

Calif. - Move over, Al Gore. Step aside, T. Boone Pickens.

Google's Eric Schmidt has an energy plan he says will solve many of America's problems.

The plan -- a mix of conservation, new sources of generation and plug-in cars -- ties together a recent string of Google investments in energy start-ups.

Global warming is a crisis, and, Schmidt noted in a San Francisco speech Monday night, "A crisis is a terrible thing to waste."

Schmidt, Google's chief executive officer and chairman, began his talk at the Corporate EcoForum at the Fairmont Hotel with a presentation featuring Google Earth. Zooming in and out, and traveling (virtually) around the globe, he spun a tale of rising temperatures and government policies that are either speeding up or slowing down climate change.

Ultimately, though, no one is doing enough, Schmidt said.

"There's a total failure of political leadership, at least in the United States, if not in the world," he said.

His plan, he said, deals with a three-part problem: an over-reliance on oil, which often comes from foreign sources; a sluggish world economy desperately in need of a new segment of jobs; and global warming.

What needs to be accomplished? Two things, Schmidt said:

* Get all electricity from renewable sources in 20 years.

* Eliminate half of the gasoline cars on U.S. roads.

It'll cost a lot -- $2.7 trillion -- but it'll generate a huge amount of savings, and create a lot of new jobs, including 500,000 in the wind industry alone, he said.

Not surprisingly, since Google.org, the company's philanthropic wing has invested in all of them, Schmidt advocates wind, solar thermal and enhanced geothermal as the best ways to replace fossil-fuel energy generation. "If you do the math," Schmidt said, those technologies can provide energy that's as reliable and nearly as cost-effective as the coal and natural gas plants in use today.

He also suggested the information technology community could help promote energy-efficiency improvements as well as needed upgrades to the electrical grid. And companies such as Google can improve the operation of its buildings and lessen the energy used by its data centers. In fact, the company recently gained patents for data centers that will float on barges and use the motion of ocean waves to create power.

The fight against global warming is a big deal, Schmidt said, and he doesn't understand why more people don't realize it.

"This is the largest opportunity that I could possibly imagine," Schmidt said.

The Corporate EcoForum is a two-day conference attended by top sustainability executives from more than 100 companies including General Motors, Oracle, Clorox, Sony. Schmidt's speech will be posted on YouTube by Wednesday, Google staffers said.