Clean Vapors

The New York Times' Miguel Helft tallies up Google's efforts to invest in renewable energy and push for policies that reduce the country's reliance on coal and oil: $45 million in solar, wind, and geothermal start-ups; an in-house team that explores plug-in hybrids and smart electricity meters to help people use electricity more efficiently; a partnership with General Electric to pressure the federal government to modernize the power grid; and Clean Energy 2030, a rather grandly proposed $4.4 trillion wish-list of federal initiatives in alternative and renewable energy. The list isn't exactly news, but Helft points out that Google's enormous plans are maturing at exactly the wrong moment in the economy. "With a recession looming and oil prices dropping, investors might pressure Google to curtail its clean energy ambitions," he writes.

Although Google's third-quarter numbers were impressive, its stock is half what it was last year, and investors are growing impatient with the company's "20 percent" culture of letting engineers dedicate one day a week to projects that don't focus on growing Google's revenues or do anything other than make the world a better place. "Google is a search and advertising company," analyst Ross Sandler told Helft. "We are in a belt-tightening period. They should focus on the core business."

One reason Google is ramping up its clean-energy efforts may simply be that the company is a little embarrassed about how much juice it gobbles up every day. The company refuses to disclose any information about power use and even refused to build a data center in Oklahoma until the state legislature let it keep energy consumption data private. But Helft found two people who work at Google's Oregon data center who claimed that that facility alone used enough energy to power more than 37,000 homes.