Educational Reference for Energy Power Alternatives

Bill Weihl: Google's Green Energy Czar

2010-03-11T03:15:00.000-08:00

“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

2010-03-03T22:40:00.000-08:00

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.

Concept Of Kinetic Energy

The faster the body moves the more kinetic energy is produced. The greater the mass and speed of an object the more kinetic energy there will be. As the train accelerates down the hill the potential energy is converted into kinetic energy.

KE = (1/2)mv2

where:

KE = Energy (in Joules)

m = mass (in kilograms)

v = velocity (in meters/sec)

*Trivia:

According to wikipedia: The Greek word

κίνηση

kinesis that means motion in english has the same root as in the word cinema which refers to motion pictures.

“The work needed to accelerate a body of a given mass from rest to it's current velocity.”

An object exerts it's kinetic energy during acceleration and maintains it unless it's speed changes. An object's kinetic energy is completely relative.

For example, if you are looking on a moving car, the car has kinetic energy according to your reference frame, but in the car's (the one you are looking) perspective, it has zero since the reference frame is moving along with the object. The total kinetic energy of both object does not completely removable by choosing the reference frame, unless all of the objects have the same velocity being exerted to move.

*Trivia: Did you know that Einstein's Über die spezielle und die allgemeine Relativitätstheorie E=mc² is also related to kinetic energy? Kinetic Energy was defined as mc² / √1-v²/c²

Potential Energy

Potential Energy is also known as the Stored Energy of an object. An object's potential energy may be the result of it's current postion or configuration of different parts of a specific system. Any object has potential energy that can be converted to different energy forms. A formal definition for Potential Energy is that it is the difference between the energy of an object in a certain position and it's energy at a reference position.

Concept Of Potential Energy

The potential energy U is equal to the work you must do to move an object from the U=0 reference point to the position r. The reference point at which you assign the value U=0 is arbitrary, so may be chosen for convenience, like choosing the origin of a coordinate system.

The force on an object is the negative of the derivative of the potential function U. This means it is the negative of the slope of the potential energy curve. Plots of potential functions are valuable aids to visualizing the change of the force in a given region of space.

*Trivia:

The word “Potential Energy” was first coined by William Rankine, a physicist and an engineer in 19^th century Scottland.

PE = mgh

where:

PE = Energy (in Joules)

m = mass (in kilograms)

g = (9.8 m/sec2) the gravitational acceleration of the earth

h = height above earth's surface (in meters)

Potential Energy exists where there is a force which pulls a certain object back to another position where lower energy can be found. It's like stretching a rubber band from it's initial postion and then releasing it. The Principle of Conservation of Energy states that "Energy cannot be created nor destroyed; Hence, Energy cannot disappear. Instead, it is stored as potential energy. If the rubber band is released or the mass is dropped, the stored energy will be converted into kinetic energy by the restoring force, which is elasticity in the case of the rubber band, and gravity in the case of the mass.

*Trivia: Gravity as we know is another form of Potential Energy.

Introduction To Energy, What Is It?

2010-02-08T03:08:00.000-08:00

Ever wonder what keeps living things or even non-living things going? What I meant by "going" doesn't limit itself to moving, well except for the non-living part. Energy is the word we are looking for. Yes, Energy has many forms that we used almost everytime everyday.

Right now, I can't think of anything that doesn't use energy. I know you can think of something right now. But after you know the different forms of energy. You might probably have this second thoughts about your answer now.

Let's talk about energy. Energy is a common word we hear and use almost everyday. It is also one of the most fundamental part of the universe. That means almost all living and non-living things around us, in or out of this planet, uses energy.

"Energy help us do things. It is the ability to do work."

Energy helps us do things, that's why it is also defined as the ability to do work. You already probably noticed the use or the application of energy in our daily life. Everything we see has it's own energy. Energy is also present outside this planet. One of the most known sign that energy existed in space is the Big Bang theory and the popular equation E = MC2 by the world renowned scientist, Einstein.

ENERGY: History and Beginnings

Now we know what is energy, the exact term that I am talking about. It's time to go to and find out where the idea of energy started and who are the people that contributed to the discovery of one of the most important fundamental part of science and the universe.

Concept Of Energy

The concept of energy emerged out of the idea of vis viva, which Leibniz defined as the product of the mass of an object and its velocity squared; he believed that total vis viva was conserved. To account for slowing due to friction, Leibniz theorized that heat consisted of the random motion of the constituent parts of matter, a view shared by Isaac Newton, although it would be more than a century until this was generally accepted.

History of Energy

You probably might be thinking when did energy started to came about. When did man and probably plants and animals, and other living and non-living things used this energy? Well, for me, we already are using a form of energy from the very beginning. Yes, from the start of time till now we are still using it. The only difference is that the modern world already comprises more uses of different forms of energy. But to track the very first time where we began to discover and use energy was back when our ancestors discover "Fire". Yes, it is one of the very first discoveries and a useful one to be exact. Now we already are using different kinds of energy sources and technology evolved through time. Nuclear, Geothermal, Hydropower, Solarthermal and many more are some of the examples of energy sources today.

Word Usage

The word 'Energy' was derived from the greek word (ἐνέργεια) 'energeia' which means 'activity' or indicating something 'in work' and (ἐνεργός) energos which means 'active' or 'working'. Energeia is also mention in the works of Aristotle. It is one of the most important Greek technical term to be used in science.

When the word "energy" is used outside the boundaries of physics, where it is used in many ways, it can lead to ambiguity and inconsistency. The vernacular terminology is not consistent with technical terminology. For example, while energy is always conserved (in the sense that the total energy does not change despite energy transformations), energy can be converted into a form. For example, thermal energy cannot be utilized to perform work.

When one talks about "conserving energy by driving less," one talks about conserving fossil fuels and preventing useful energy from being lost as heat. This usage of the word "conserve" differs from that of the law of conservation of energy.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/kids/energy.cfm?page=timelines