Forum Moderators: goodroi
The United States government has been unable to fix the country's energy problems, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said, but the Internet giant on Wednesday proposed its own 22-year solution."We have seen a total and complete failure of leadership in the political parties of the United States," Schmidt said in a speech at the Commonwealth Club here. "We've been working on a plan to help solve this problem."
Earlier in the day, Google unveiled that plan, which doesn't lack for chutzpah: Clean Energy 2030 aims to wean the United States from its dependence on fossil fuels within 22 years.Schmidt said the plan requires $4.5 trillion in spending to pull it off, but it'll pay for itself with $5.5 trillion in savings. "With this plan, it's cheaper to fix global warming than it is to ignore it," Schmidt said.
Clean Energy 2030 - [knol.google.com]Google's Proposal for reducing U.S. dependence on fossil fuels
Commitment to Sustainable Computing [google.com]
Saving electricity one data center at a time [googleblog.blogspot.com]
can’t wait to see Eric Schmidt, in a calm and patient manner, working all of this out with congress.
FIRING everyone in Congress. ;)
We can put partisanship aside these days when it comes to Congress. Both Republicans and Democrats are absolutely worthless. They seem to think the idea behind getting elected is to simply gain power rather than to serve the people.
I'd like to see Eric Schmidt, in a calm and patient manner, FIRING everyone in Congress. ;)
I think we can leave that to the public in about 35 days.
I'd say solar panel computers, although I don't know how much sun you guys get in America. EDF energy will be coming your way soon enough i'm sure..
These would only make good ornaments in Wales though - it always rains there.
What? That person is just stating an opinion on the work of a government.
It is exactly because of this perverse attitude of attacking people's opinions that the US is in the state that is now: people refrain from criticizing an incompetent administration just so that they are not accused of being partisan.
The worst dictatorships have never achieved such high levels of auto-censorship. Scary stuff.
Go Eric, talk loud.
Anyways, this is a perfect business move for Google, they need to diversify their business, and they also rely on cheap resources (energy) in order to provide a free service that will incur a minimal operation cost.
[edited by: Hugene at 3:02 pm (utc) on Oct. 3, 2008]
Someone calculated that we'd need 600 giant solar towers to power the entire country at $800 million each. That's only $480 billion total for free, clean energy forever.
Someone calculated that we'd need 600 giant solar towers to power the entire country
But it's also quite a liability if that is the only source of power. It sounds like very high profile (and not easily protected?) targets for terrorists (foreign and domestic).
I say diversify- build some of those, some more wind farms, add some new nuke plants, and push alternative fuel cars.
It sounds like very high profile (and not easily protected?)
If you see a plane flying towards one of them in the middle of nowhere it's a pretty safe bet to shoot it down. Cars would have a lot of trouble getting near them as well. A few ICBMs could take them out but if that happened we'd probably have a few going back the other way and being without power would be the least of our troubles. I do agree that wind, solar and nuclear is the way to go however. It's best to be diversified as sunlight is not constant and is unpredictable. Still $480 billion spread of out over 5 years is only about $95 billion per year. Our government produced $3.5 trillion in taxes in 2007. When you factor in the effect being energy independent would have on the dollar it would be more than free in the long-run, we'd make a huge profit. We'd also be able to spend far less on our $640 billion per year military as we could leave the Middle East alone. Also, if we did that there'd be a lot less people in the world with the desire to knock the towers down.
One more thing, these are not solar panels, they are giant greenhouses that trap heat from the desert air and funnel it up through a huge skyscraper-like tower. On the way up the air causes turbines to spin thereby producing electricity.
