Bill Weihl: Google's Green Energy Czar

“We see a chance to make a difference in the field of renewable energy and energy information that can help bring the world to a lower carbon and more efficient economy.” According to Bill Weihl.

Bill Weihl put out his efforts in activities that include energy efficiency and renewable energy, and also manages the company's greenhouse-gas footprint that's why he is also known as Google's Green Energy Czar. Bill Weihl is charged in leading his company, Google (one of the leading search engines in the internet), into the renewable-energy economy. Back in 2009, he was featured in TIME magazine as one of the “Heroes of the Environment 2009.”

"In the process we're saving ourselves a lot of money by making ourselves more efficient," says Bill Weihl.

First, Google people have put their own house in order. Bill's task begins by greening Google itself. Goggle’s data centers make sure that 300 million web searches take place smoothly. Google has managed to cut its server energy use by more than 50% of electricity their data centers uses that normally takes these searches into huge costs as they devour ravenous amount of electricity.

His efforts helped the company become carbon-neutral along with the renewable energy it draws from a gleaming 1.6 MW solar installation at Mountain View, Calif., Google's headquarters and a carefully selected carbon offsets.


Green Inc., interviewed Google's resident “Green Energy Czar”:

Green Inc.: Google is obviously best-known as an Internet company. Why is Google involved with alternative energy in the first place?

Bill Weihl: I’d say there are two reasons. One is that we use a moderate amount of energy ourselves: we have a lot of servers, and we have 22,000 employees around the world with office buildings that consume a lot of energy. So we use energy and we care about the cost of that, we care about the environmental impact of it, and we care about the reliability of it. The other reason is that, starting with the founders and filtering down to many of our employees, people care about environmental issues…

The simple answer is that we all feel it’s our responsibility as good citizens to make sure that our own impact is as small as possible relative to the environment, and from a philanthropic perspective, we’d like to do what we can to help the rest of the world to reduce their impact.


Green Inc.: Is Google’s work on alternative energy viewed as a money-making component of the company?

Bill Weihl: There’s not a simple answer to that question. Some of these initiatives come out of Google.org [the company’s philanthropy branch], and their primary goal is to have a positive impact on the world.

The reason Google.org is not just a foundation is that lots of people believe that if you want to have a big impact at scale on the world, then you need to go beyond what a 501(c)3 can do, which is to make charitable grants, so you need the ability to invest in companies, to do engineering projects, to do things that might at some point actually make money.

We’d be delighted if some of this stuff actually made money, obviously; it is not our goal to not make money. All else being equal, we’d like to make as much money as we can, but the principal goal is to have a big impact for good.


Green Inc.: Given Google’s aim of making money as a for-profit enterprise, how do you decide how much money, time, and effort to put into projects like alternative energy that don’t seem to be helping the bottom line?

Bill Weihl: The issue of resource allocation is a real one and it’s one that we debate all the time. I’ve seen many companies make the mistake of deciding they have very constrained resources and they focus everything on their core business, the stuff that’s relevant for the next two quarters or the next year. That works for a little while, and if you’re in a horrible downturn or a big crunch, you may have no choice, but I think that it’s really important to invest for the long term and it’s important to invest some percentage for the world, the philanthropy we’re doing.

To decide what the exact right proportions are, we use the 70-20-10 rule, which is about the internal investment we make on technology for the company: 70 percent is the main core services, 20 percent is the next layer of things right around the corner, and 10 percent is just wacky stuff.

Some people might look at that and say, “I don’t see any relationship between that and Google’s business.” And then maybe five years later they’ll say, “Whoa, it’s a good thing you guys thought about that.”

In fact, if you don’t say five years later, “We never should have done that” about a significant percentage of it, then you’re being way too conservative. So the stuff we’re doing under the Google.org umbrella on alternative energy, some of it doesn’t connect very closely to Google’s core business, some of it does, and that’s O.K.


Green Inc.: What does the pathway to cheap renewable energy at scale look like? Do you think there’s enough political and societal will to make it happen?

Bill Weihl: As a society, we have chosen to invest too little in alternative energy over the years, and that has made some of the choices much harder than they should be. We should have been investing much more in solar [photovoltaics] since the 1970s than we have. We should be investing in new wind technologies that promise substantially lower cost. We should be investing in enhanced geothermal, we should be investing in cheaper, safer, cleaner nuclear. We should be investing in figuring out how to do carbon capture and sequestration for coal plants in a way that’s cheap and energy efficient. We should be investing in all that stuff, and that’s even before you get to the stuff that’s outside the mainstream.

But to do that, it means you’re not going to invest very much in any one of those areas, and that is a huge problem. As a country, we’re investing $1-3 billion per year in clean energy R&D depending on how you count it; with the stimulus package, I think we’re up to $6 billion for a couple of years. But at the end of 2010, when the stimulus ends, we’re going to drive off the biggest funding cliff the energy field has ever seen. So I think as a society, we need to be investing much more to drive innovation and help new products get to full-scale commercialization. We need to invest across the spectrum.

I believe that the problems we’re facing are solvable, but they’re not going to solve themselves. And solving them is either going to require spending a lot more money on energy than we’re spending today, which I think is probably a non-starter, or it’s going to require major technological innovation. That’s where I think Google can help.

Quotes From The Green Energy Czar:

'I believe that the problems we’re facing are solvable, but they’re not going to solve themselves.'

'Use your computer's built-in power-management features to set your system to go to sleep, including blanking the screen and turning off the hard disk after 15 minutes of idle time.'

Two Main Classes of Energy

Introduction to the Different Types Of Energy

The 2 Main Classes of Energy

Kinetic Energy

Kinetic Energy is also known as Motion Energy. It cames from the greek word κίνηση (kinesis) which means “motion”. It's the extra energy an object possess because of it's motion. Kinetic Energy can be understood from different examples which applies or demonstrate how it was transformed to or from other forms of energy.