Google Tests Waters In Geothermal Energy With Investment

Google is so big now that it is entering other industries. It just announced, for instance, that it will invest in a geothermal energy project. Yes, Google is getting into energy!

Google is truly the American Dream company. Started by two college students, the company went from being tiny to one of the highest valued companies in the world in roughly 10 years. In doing so, it changed the way we search for things on the internet and put an absolute beating on huge companies like Yahoo and MSN who are now forced to team up to even have a chance of competing with the mighty Google.

As Google has raked in the money, it has looked to alternative business fields to generate profits. Why? Well, there is something funny about the basic Google business model. It is a one trick pony. It makes money off of the ads you see in Google search results and the placement of similar ads on third party sites like this one. That’s it, however. If anything happened to this revenue model, the company would be toast. Recognizing as much, we see it entering other markets like the smart phone market with its Android platform, the browser market with Chrome and an operating system it intends to challenge Microsoft Windows with.

Now Google is also looking into areas where it has no experience or expertise. Recognizing the energy market is fundamentally changing, it has opened a Climate and Energy division of its company. Through that division, it is jumping into a new area of the geothermal field that focuses on accessing the heat underground in new ways.

Geothermal energy works by tapping the heat inherent in the earth. The farther you drill down, the hotter it gets. Geothermal plants drill down to points where it is hot enough to either tap pressurized water pockets or send liquids down to heat up and then bring back up for tapping. The heat is then used to create steam and turn turbines like in a hydroelectric dam. The energy is clean and it is estimated that tapping just 2 percent of the potential energy in the US land mass would provide over 2,000 times our annual need for energy. That’s a lot of energy.

Google is investing via its philanthropic arm in Potter Drilling. Potter is taking a new approach to drilling. Instead of using metal and diamond devices, it has created a jet engine like item that shoots water to break up rock and earth. This then bores down into the surface of the earth until the appropriate depth is met. If the system can be developed, it would create cleaner, quicker drilling process that would suddenly make geothermal energy a viable platform pretty much anywhere in the world. In short, it would revolutionize energy much like Google revolutionized the search game.

<< Back to Geothermal Energy

No posts found in this thread

2012.05.17 - 05:38:51 Please login or register to post. Add New User Choose username: Choose password: Retype password: E-mail: Please enter the correct letters and numbers from the image into the text box. This helps prevent spam.   Login Username:   Password: Forgot Password?

Login | Register