Google’s Green Agenda and Real Energy Savings
Sitting on $14.5 billion in cash, Google has made more than $45 million in investments in solar, wind and geothermal technology companies. Can a search engine company produce better results than the venture capitalists in Silicon Valley? Should the U.S. Government’s energy investment priorities be different than Silicon Valley’s?
According to a story last month in the New York Times, Google is “seriously dabbling” in green energy investments. Do you think that a company like Google can produce results through investments in startup companies? Is this a good use of their time and money? Will their lobbying power convince the Obama administration and the Congress to raise the stakes with more than $15 billion annual investment in clean energy technologies? Think how that money could really be used to help the economy. If a cost-effective building energy retrofit would cost $1.50 per square foot, then $15 billion would retrofit 10 billion square feet of U.S. real estate, producing (at $0.50 per sq.ft. annual savings, i.e. a three-year payback) $5 billion a year in real energy savings. 10 billion square feet is roughly equivalent to 2,500 buildings the size of Chicago’s Merchandise Mart, the largest since commercial building in the country. If this government investment were leveraged only 2 to 1, we could retrofit 20 billion square feet per year. In four years we could retrofit all of the US commercial real estate, based on the 72 billion square foot size of the building stock in 2003, according to the Department of Energy. That’s where the money should be going, don’t you think?
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