The rapidly dropping price of solar power has transformed how we think about clean energy. But it needs to still get a whole lot cheaper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In late 2007, less than 10 years into the company\u2019s existence, Google came out swinging on the clean energy front. To a fanfare of plaudits up and down Silicon Valley and well beyond, it declared \u201cRE<C\u201d as its goal<\/a>: make renewable energy cheaper than coal. The company invested tens of millions of dollars into R&D efforts from concentrated solar power to hydrothermal drilling. Four years later, those efforts had been scrapped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It would be all too easy to see this as an admission of failure\u2014big tech playing in an arena it knew nothing about, with the hubris that Silicon Valley is known for. But something else was going on. Google\u2019s shift in strategy was a reflection of the growing success of the\u00a0solar sector<\/a>. Google realized its energies were better directed toward massively scaling up existing renewable technologies that had plummeted in price, rather than inventing new ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From: https:\/\/www.technologyreview.com\/2021\/06\/30\/1026507\/cheap-solar-pv-google-clean-energy\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The rapidly dropping price of solar power has transformed how we think about clean energy. But it needs to still get a whole lot cheaper. In late 2007, less than 10 years into the company\u2019s existence, Google came out swinging on the clean energy front. To a fanfare of plaudits up and down Silicon Valley…
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