Google's energy czar talks shop

Bill Weihl

Bill Weihl, most commonly referred to as Google’s energy czar, is working to incorporate the company’s tech prowess to create energy-efficiency and renewable energy solutions to reduce its own energy use as well as its customers.

Mountain View, Calif.–based Google [Nasdaq: GOOG] claims it has managed to cut energy usage in its data centers by more than 50 percent. A company known for being secretive about its technology innovations, location of data centers and other information, the company made an uncharacteristic move in 2009 when it hosted the Efficient Data Centers Summit at its headquarters. It shared the work it had done to reduce energy use at its data centers and even went so far as to post the conference hearings on YouTube.

Google has helped fund research and development efforts at eSolar and BrightSource Energy, as well as its own research. Early in 2010, Google announced plans to create one-gigabit-per-second fiber optic networks in select U.S. communities in an effort to put pressure on the telecom industry to upgrade the nation’s Internet infrastructure. (The latest “State of the Internet” report from Akamai Technologies, where Weihl formerly served as chief technology officer, listed the United States No. 18 on connectivity speed.)

We caught up with Weihl during his visit to the Northwest in Spring of 2010. He discussed some of the work being done by Google employees to test renewable energy and energy-efficient technologies as well as its plans to bring the nation up to speed in terms of Internet connectivity.

SI: Google is testing out numerous innovative technologies, from plug-in hybrids to solar panels to super efficient data centers. Where are you directing most of your attention? What are you most passionate about?
BW: Those projects started a couple of years ago as demonstration projects to help highlight what plug-in hybrids can do. They are still available for Google employees to use. We have a shuttle fleet. I take the bus from San Fran every day, for example. That gives us a lot of real-world data, which is useful for both us and those working on the advocacy and technology side. There is interesting R&D going on around how PHEVs can be integrated into the grid, and how they can help integrate more renewables into the grid.

Through Google.org, we donate 1 percent of equity, 1 percent net earning and 1 percent Google employee’s time. We have about 200 people from Google working on things for dot-org projects.

Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (RE<C) makes investments in renewable energy companies, batteries, electric car companies—riskier technologies with the goal of driving down the cost a lot faster. We have an internal R&D team focused on solar thermal.

The Google Power Meter is another Google.org project. The engineering work is done through Google. That’s a service that we’re offering that’s targeted to residential consumers to allow them to get a real-time view of their real-time electricity and energy usage. We plan to include natural gas in the future. We’re building analytics—we hope that people [testing the Power Meter] can get better visibility and change their usage. Given that info, they could reduce their usage 5 percent to 15 percent.

Power Meter is a major effort right now. We have partnerships with 12 utilities and several device manufacturers. Even if you don’t have a smart meter, you could buy a device and send that info back through a home broadband router.

Those will typically give you better data because they can send the data more frequently than a typical smart meter.

We would like to see the data measured once a minute or every few seconds. Currently [with most smart meters], there is a delay from when the measurement is taken to when the user can see it. Homeowners could access a Web-based service, with no hardware to install. The customer would log into their account on their utility’s website, sign up for the Google Power Meter, and it would show up on their iGoogle homepage.

SI: Where are some of your more innovative data centers?
BW: The Dalles data center in Oregon was one of the fist data centers we built for ourselves. It has a lot of innovative technologies for energy efficiency. Cooling is the biggest source of energy overhead—at a typical data center, it’s 100 percent of the energy overhead. On top of what you need to power the computers, you double that to make sure you can cool them and provide back-up power. Our facilities have about 20 percent energy overhead. A lot of that innovation was done at The Dalles data center. None of it is rocket science. It takes careful engineering and well-understood best practices in the industry.

We opened the book publicly to what we are doing in our data centers. We hosted an Efficient Data Centers Summit and invited competitors and key people in the data center industry, including Uptime Institute and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

SI: You are putting a lot of research into renewables. Are you looking to run your data centers off renewables?
BW: We are interested in getting more renewables to power our data centers, both at the data centers and in the regions where our data centers are. We are still two or three years away—at least to the point of being able to deploy these at scale beyond a pilot deployment. We would love to deploy this in areas where we have big facilities.