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Lessons Learned From Google's Green Energy Bust 222

Posted by timothy from the systems-have-momentum-and-context dept.
the_newsbeagle writes In 2007, Google boldly declared a new initiative to invent a green energy technology that produced cheaper electricity than coal-fired power plants. Sure, energy researchers had been hammering at this task for decades, but Google hoped to figure it out in a few years. They didn't. Instead, Google admitted defeat and shut down the project in 2011. In a admirable twist, however, two of the project's engineers then dedicated themselves to learning from the project's failure. What did it mean that one of the world's most ambitious and capable innovation companies couldn't invent a cheap renewable energy tech?
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Lessons Learned From Google's Green Energy Bust More

Lessons Learned From Google's Green Energy Bust

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  • Bad sign. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jythie ( 914043 ) on Thursday November 20, 2014 @11:09AM (#48425779)
    I think this speaks a lot about how companies and the population are increasingly thinking in rather short terms and how little respect the modern tech elite have for those who came before them. There seems to be this attitude that difficult problems are only unsolved because the 'wrong' people have looked at it and flush with arrogance for solving comparatively simple internet related ones they believe that they are smarter and thus will quickly tackle what those 'researchers' and 'old fogies' could not.

    And when gratification is not instant, they move on.

    I also see this, on a smaller but more insidious scale, in the almost pathological desire to not learn from the past developers have been fetishizing. Too often learning roots or old technologies 'taints' a person with 'old' ideas rather than teaching them lessons others have already learned so that they can move on from there. So many 'new' technologies that when the developers are asked 'ok, this is great, but how do you plan to address the issues that were encountered last time?' they just look at you blankly and claim this is new and innovative, or that you just don't understand.

    Ok, got a bit off topic there ^_^

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by LWATCDR ( 28044 )

      I see your point the problem imho is the assumption that solar and wind can be made cheap and reliable. The one cheap, reliable, renewable energy source has been working well for centuries which is hydro.
      Wind and solar have a future but they will be supplements to other energy systems and not the main source.
      Well unless we have super leaps battery/storage and possibly room temperature superconductors.

      • Or highly efficient solar cells...they still wouldn't generate power at night, but they'd be too cheap and clean to not use to the fullest.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ledow ( 319597 )

      It's all a problem of advertising hype.

      Old isn't "old".

      It's tried.
      Field-tested.
      Verified.
      Proven.
      Established.
      De-facto.
      Standardised.

      Whenever someone says they want to throw out the "old", especially in computing terms (e.g. init systems, *cough*), I mentally substitute those words. And when I'm not immediately keen to jump on board, I get mocked.

      Until the project flops, that is, or the reinvention of the wheel, or the having to sacrifice functionality, or the realisation that two systems are needed, or whatev

    • It's good old fashioned human pride. Ignoring human experience to inflate our own egos. We have so much more useless information and new ways of sharing it now that there's no way we can't make things better. We're doing it with politics, education, social/cultural norms, etc. We don't need the insight of history when we have all this information and an infinity of new ways of connecting our collective ignorance. And we call it "progress".
    • I've no idea how Google approached this challenge, but in a lot of companies, innovation consists of clever and novel applications and combinations of existing technologies, or making good use of a couple of incremental improvements. It often does yield results: this is what Google did to reduce power requirements in their data centers. And it's in itself a useful exercise to identify gaps (e.g. "For a practical electric vehicle, we need a battery that is this good"), then focus on closing those gaps with

    • I don't think it's really off topic. When I read, "What did it mean that one of the world's most ambitious and capable innovation companies couldn't invent a cheap renewable energy tech?" my first thought was, "It probably means that inventing cheap renewable energy is difficult, if not beyond our current technology, if not impossible. What, did these Google engineers really believe that the only reason it hasn't been done yet is that everyone else is stupid?"

      There's definitely something a bit silly abou

      • Correction:

        while somehow failing to recognize that the results of those methods are products that are often not unstable

        It should be either "products that are unstable" or "products that are not stable". My point there is, you can make lots of iterative improvements on Google Plus because it's software that can be changed after deployment, and if you screw it up and have a small disaster, who cares? People are briefly without their social network while you fix the problem or restore from a backup, or whatever. A lot of things aren't like that. Not all software engineering concepts are universally applicable.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tx ( 96709 )

      I think this speaks a lot about how companies and the population are increasingly thinking in rather short terms and how little respect the modern tech elite have for those who came before them. There seems to be this attitude that difficult problems are only unsolved because the 'wrong' people have looked at it and flush with arrogance for solving comparatively simple internet related ones they believe that they are smarter and thus will quickly tackle what those 'researchers' and 'old fogies' could not.

      I don't think that accurately reflects the attitude, although it might sometimes seem that way. There is nothing wrong with thinking that coming at old problems from a new direction, with fresh ideas, and bringing the latest science and technology to bear on the problems, might throw up new solutions. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Having respect for "those who came before" doesn't mean assuming that problems can't be solved just because they haven't been solved already.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jythie ( 914043 )
        I completely agree that one can have respect and re-examine things, with new one off technologies and perspectives often leading to progress. It is the lack of respect and the push to not even be aware of the past that tends to bother me, or the belief that problems were not solved in the past because of the inferriority of the people involved.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

      In this instance the problem has been solved, as solar will soon be cheaper than coal and is already cheaper than nuclear. They picked the wrong project really, they should have been looking at ways to make the grid take better advantage of cheap and clean energy sources.

      Google has hundreds of projects on the go all the time. Some come good, some don't. You have to try to know that it can't be done.

      • No, THE PROBLEM hasn't been solved. THE PROBLEM was "avoid climate change associated catastrophe". That's was their retrospective pointed out. Even had they come up with a 'free' solar panel, it would not have decreased CO2 output enough to avoid the forcings found in current climate models (whether or not you believe in that model is irrelevant for the sake of this discussion).

        That is an important distinction. They basically ran the numbers and figured out they could not 'win' this one. But you hav

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by swb ( 14022 )

        Solar only feels like half a solution without cheap, high capacity heavy-cycle batteries capable of running everything for several days with zero power input and providing boost power for when solar output lags.

        I'm thinking like 120kWh for under $10k.

        If there's some way to store enough potential solar energy you can generate then even something like 15w/sq ft ought to be adequate.

  • What does it mean? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It means you ain't smarter than the generations that went before you.

    If you don't like the choices previous generations made, you first should figure out WHY they made those choices before deciding they were wrong.

    • Re:What does it mean? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by GameboyRMH ( 1153867 ) <<moc.liamg> <ta> <hmryobemag>> on Thursday November 20, 2014 @11:38AM (#48425947) Journal

      If you don't like the choices previous generations made, you first should figure out WHY they made those choices before deciding they were wrong.

      And you can learn a lot in the process of finding this out. Sometimes I wonder why nobody has tried X, I look it up and 9 times out of 10 there are good reasons, and I learn what they are instead of wasting time. Then there's the 1 time out of 10, like when I asked why nobody invented a hydraulic anti-roll system for cars that can also control squat and dive, years before FRICS was used in F1 (originally I was thinking it could get around the problem of sway bars getting bent in offroad racing).

      • This reminds me of an expression I'm now quite fond of:

        Three months in a lab can save one week in the library

    • How about, "They had no idea burning all the oil in the ground would make half the species on the planet go extinct in 200 years"? New information demands new choices.

    • If you don't like the choices previous generations made, you first should figure out WHY they made those choices before deciding they were wrong.

      Most of the time the answer boils down to "it seemed like a good idea at the time". We use fossil fuels because they were available and we figured out how to make the economical sooner than some of the alternatives. We didn't know about some of the environmental side effects at the time. Same with nuclear. We tried all sorts of things with radiation that we now consider insane because we didn't know any better at the time. We figured much of it out in time but we didn't magically know all the problems

  • This is a good reminder for all technocrats (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dunkelfalke ( 91624 ) on Thursday November 20, 2014 @11:16AM (#48425815)

    I have seen - predominantly on Slashdot, obviously, but also elsewhere, a sort of naive technocrats (who are often also libertarians) believing that as soon as some technology is needed, the invisible hand of the market magically creates this technology so one only has to sit and wait for this magic solution to appear out of thin air. The more down-to-earth kind of these people even tried to explain this magic by telling that this process happens by throwing enough money at a problem.

    Unfortunately - and TFA is a picture book example of this - reality doesn't work that way. Breakthroughs don't happen by magic, they happen by meticulous research and a shitload of small steps. Solutions don't suddenly appear just when they are needed, a long lead time of research is required. And sometimes this new technology never comes up at all.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I have seen - predominantly on Slashdot, obviously, but also elsewhere, a sort of naive technocrats (who are often also liberals or progressives or socialists) believing that as soon as some technology is needed, the state magically creates this technology so one only has to sit and wait for this magic solution to appear out of thin air. The more down-to-earth kind of these people even tried to explain this magic by telling that this process happens by throwing enough money at a problem.

      Unfortunately - and

      • Butthurt much?

        Well, fact is that governments sponsor most of basic research. It still takes very long time to fruit and I think most people who want the government to continue funding basic research are well aware of it.

        • Well, fact is that governments sponsor most of basic research. It still takes very long time to fruit and I think most people who want the government to continue funding basic research are well aware of it.

          I'm registered Libertarian and I support government sponsored basic research. Why? It's not a problem well solved by a free market.

      • dunkelfalke (91624) writes:

        I have seen - predominantly on Slashdot, obviously, but also elsewhere, a sort of naive technocrats (who are often also libertarians) believing that as soon as some technology is needed, the invisible hand of the market magically creates this technology so one only has to sit and wait for this magic solution to appear out of thin air. The more down-to-earth kind of these people even tried to explain this magic by telling that this process happens by throwing enough money at a problem.

        --and Anonymous Coward responds

        I have seen - predominantly on Slashdot, obviously, but also elsewhere, a sort of naive technocrats (who are often also liberals or progressives or socialists) believing that as soon as some technology is needed, the state magically creates this technology so one only has to sit and wait for this magic solution to appear out of thin air. The more down-to-earth kind of these people even tried to explain this magic by telling that this process happens by throwing enough money at a problem.

        OK, somebody should moderate both of these as "troll".

        There is some insight here, but the insight is completely washed out by the gratuitous insults and use of deliberately slanted vocabulary.

        In fact, the market is good at solving some types of problems. And government is good at solving some of the types of problems that the market isn't good at. But people of all political views always call approaches that don't fit their ideology "throwing money

    • a sort of naive technocrats (who are often also libertarians) believing that as soon as some technology is needed, the invisible hand of the market magically creates this technology so one only has to sit and wait for this magic solution to appear out of thin air

      And then they assume (again, by magical thinking) that the invisible hand isn't busy lining its own pockets and that it will arrive at optimal outcomes. Optimal for who?

      Commerce as it exists today means the invisible hand has been bought off by lob

      • Commerce as it exists today means the invisible hand has been bought off by lobbyists, and it's now more interested in protecting the interests of major players.

        To me, the invisible hand and the perfect, magical outcomes attributed to it is the biggest lie of economics.

        So, what you're offended by is government interference in the economy?

        Because "bought off by lobbyists" is exactly that - government interference in the economy.

        It's interesting, by the by, that you seem to have the exact same idea regard

        • So, what you're offended by is government interference in the economy?

          No, what I'm offended by is the magical, bullshit thinking of certain kinds of economics which claims the free market solves problems and achieves optimal outcomes, and the fetishization of the capitalism as some holy and noble goal which contains Higher Truth -- because I think it's a lie and a fairy tale.

          It's interesting, by the by, that you seem to have the exact same idea regarding lobbyists and such that Ayn Rand had.

          LOL, no ... it i

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mlts ( 1038732 )

      Sometimes the new technology was just sitting there disused all along. There are a lot of things that are sitting around that are waiting to be rediscovered. Hybrid cars for example were made in the late 1800s/early 1900s.

      There are a lot of factors involved... the invention, making the invention marketable, getting the factories able to mass produce it and the parts required. Just small innovations like a machine that can twist metal links for a chain can mean immense improvements in product availability

    • I think you're generally right about the subject, you've however completely confused "libertarians" with "liberals".

    • And sometimes you need a someone who doesn't have all the baggage and assumptions to jump into things and attack a problem from a different perspective ala SpaceX.

      Its true that "solutions dont suddenly appear just when they are needed", but your not going to find them if you dont look. And sometimes all the assumptions that the "established" research communities make hide the answer from them. Especially when much of the research is funded by groups with a conflict of interest.

      Its no magic wand, but I, fo

  • my takeaway (Score:5, Interesting)

    by buddyglass ( 925859 ) on Thursday November 20, 2014 @11:21AM (#48425845)
    The big news to me isn't that they weren't able to invent the tech, but their estimate that even if their most optimistic scenario had come true w.r.t. clean energy tech that it still wouldn't be enough to avoid the "really bad" scenario w.r.t. climate change (if you trust Hansen's models).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ledow ( 319597 )

      This is my biggest problem with "green" things.

      Sure, we can make changes. But what impact will the changes have and, compared to what will happen otherwise, is that better for us or not? If the changes enforced by the new ideas actually cost us more than just carrying on anyway, or gain us nothing, we're really just wasting time.

      As such, I often think that all the "renewable" debate is taking too long. Can't we just pump that money into fusion and be done with it? That would give us a kickstart to having

      • If the cost of stopping the sea level rising is a million deaths worldwide [...] is that better or worse than even abandoning countries and low-lying areas entirely? I have no idea. And unfortunately, it always seems that no-one else does either.

        Not only do these people not know, but even worse, they do not care. They just go ahead and do it anyway.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fche ( 36607 )

      The paper seems even lamer than that:
      part 1 - REC failed
      part 2 - Hansen says we're doomed
      part 2a - we'd be doomed even if REC succeeded
      part 3 - solution: "spend more money on R&D"

  • That was 3 years ago (Score:5, Insightful)

    by robot256 ( 1635039 ) on Thursday November 20, 2014 @11:42AM (#48425981)

    You can't "invent" cheaper tech--it only gets cheaper if you invest in mass-producing it. They gave up 3 years ago, and since then market forces have actually achieved price parity [cleantechnica.com] for renewables in a lot of the world. It wasn't any new "magic bullet" research that did it, but incremental improvements driven by economies of scale. Yes, government played a big role, but primarily as a driver of demand and investor in manufacturing.

    The climate does not have time to wait for a new technology to be developed and go through the whole sequence of commercialization and commoditization. The solar panels, wind turbines and batteries we already have can do the job--and the more we build, the cheaper they get.. This is one place I wish market purists would get on board--put a price on carbon, and solutions will come out of the woodwork and plummet in price.

    • This is one place I wish market purists would get on board--put a price on carbon, and solutions will come out of the woodwork and plummet in price.

      Except market purists balk at this because "putting a price on carbon" is an artificial thing - it's screwing around with the markets. The markets have already spoken: the externalities of climate change (relocation costs, war, health costs) have a lower cost than trying to develop alternatives. These costs are already really accounted for, even though they ar

    • You can't "invent" cheaper tech--it only gets cheaper if you invest in mass-producing it.

      That's only sort of half true. You can invent a technology that is fundamentally less expensive than previous alternatives at the same production scales. It's not merely a matter of more = cheaper.

  • Why would anyone expect Google to be special? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sjbe ( 173966 ) on Thursday November 20, 2014 @11:43AM (#48425985)

    What did it mean that one of the world's most ambitious and capable innovation companies couldn't invent a cheap renewable energy tech?

    Umm, nothing. Google has no special expertise in energy tech. This is WAY outside their core businesses where they have a proven competence. The notion that they would to solve the economic problem of renewable energy where everyone else had (so far) failed is somewhere between well intentioned altruism and pure undiluted hubris. (not sure where on that scale though) The only thing Google has is smart people and a huge bank account. Those are nice assets to work with but just because you can throw smart people and money at a problem doesn't mean a solution will magically appear in a timely manner. Research is unpredictable and requires long term dedication. And even if you do succeed in coming up with a nifty new technology it doesn't automatically mean that the economics of it will be favorable. I'm not saying Google shouldn't try - I'm glad to see them working on and/or bankrolling research such problems. My point is that Google shouldn't be expected to be more likely to solve the problem than any number of other companies/organizations that have worked on these problems.

  • What it means is that Google has a tendency to assume the set of intelligent people in the world (outside academia perhaps) is a subset of the set of Google employees.

  • and no amount of fiddling by a hack Supreme Court can change it. not even Google.

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