As Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) works almost tirelessly to develop technologies for early and easy detection of cancer and heart attack, a dark past may haunt the Internet search giant in its new technology agendas.
The company abandoned an ambitious project that aimed at making renewable energy cheaper compared with coal. The project halted about three years ago, but details have scant about why Google pulled the plugs on the project. However, there are surprising revelations to the cheap renewable energy saga as Forbes stated in an article.
It has emerged that Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) realized late in the day that its efforts to make energy from the sun, wind and geothermal, cheaper than coal was not going anywhere. As a matter of fact, the company discovered that sinking money into such a project was like wasting resources.
With that in mind, Google halted heavy investment in renewable energy and also ended its internal research and development funding for the same.
At the time of pulling the plugs on the so-called RE<C, Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) said that some other institutions could do it better-placed than it.
Google engineers, Ross Koningstein and David Fork, revealed the frustrations that the company faced with the cheap renewable energy project three years ago. The two have also reconsidered their views concerning electric power generation and climate change.
Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL)’s RE<C project closed shops just about four years after its launch. However, the company spent billions of dollars for the four years as it aimed to generate massive amounts of electricity cheaply from sources other than coal.
Although Google stopped RE<C, the company’s commitment to renewable energy project remains alive. The company has made significant investments in solar energy, including the recent $145 million investment in Sunedison Inc (NYSE:SUNE). Meanwhile, the coal industry remains under pressure because of its climate change sins, according to regulators and pressure groups.
