Feb. 8, 2008 ƒ‚¢ƒÂ¢¢â‚¬Å¡‚¬ƒÂ¢¢â€šÂ¬…“ Google is touting its RE<C alternative-energy investment program as the key to developing new energy projects that, without the backing of major corporations, would never scrape together the necessary financing, Reuters reports. The web-search giant pledged last November to invest heavily in research and development for new renewable energy sources that produce electricity more cheaply than coal.

"There are a lot of technologies that get to the pilot scale and look promising, but the first few large commercial projects deploying those technologies, financing those can be extremely difficult," says Dan Reicher, director of climate and energy initiatives at Google.org and the executive in charge of Googleƒ‚¢ƒÂ¢¢â‚¬Å¡‚¬ƒÂ¢¢â‚¬Å¾‚¢s green-energy push. "Often the usual equity and debt players will say come back to us when you've demonstrated this at scale.ƒ‚¢ƒÂ¢¢â‚¬Å¡‚¬ƒâ€š‚

Reicher explains that venture capital firms rarely commit enough funds to, for example, build a solar plant that can produce electricity on a commercial scale.

"When you get to building a commercial-scale project in the energy world, you can be looking easily at hundreds of millions or even across the billion dollar threshold," he says. "Over the years [Google] will be looking at [investing] hundreds of millions of dollars.ƒ‚¢ƒÂ¢¢â‚¬Å¡‚¬ƒâ€š‚

Google has so far committed $20 million to solar-thermal and wind energy projects in California. The company is also considering funding research into enhanced geothermal systems, or EGS.

"We arrived at these three technologies because we think they have real promise to move down the cost curve and to be competitive with coal and to get to very large scale," Reicher explains.