As part of its goal to be carbon neutral

Jan 7, 2010 11:47 GMT  ·  By

Google is getting into a lot of things these days, operating systems, even phones, so there shouldn't be anything surprising to us coming from the Mountain View company. Except maybe that it's getting into the utility business, but that's exactly what the company is doing with the newly formed Google Energy. In all fairness, Google doesn't plan to compete with the established utility companies, but it has filed a request with the federal regulators in the US to become a licensed wholesaler of electricity mostly to achieve its plans of being carbon neutral.

Cnet reports that Google has set up a subsidiary called Google Energy, based in Delaware, last month and its submission has now been forwarded to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the US agency which oversees the national power grid. Google is now awaiting approval but, in theory, there shouldn't be any problems.

Google is deeply interested in green technology and energy savings and has several related projects mostly run through its philanthropic arm Google.org. A couple of years ago, the company made a pledge to become carbon neutral and is pursuing several means of achieving that. Last year, the company said it had managed to achieve that goal for 2007 and part of 2008.

One way of lowering its carbon footprint is by lowering the energy consumption of its power-hungry data centers and other operations. It also runs a carbon offset program, but Google says it's trying to de-emphasize these solutions in favor of more long-term options.

One solution was to build a big solar energy plant at its headquarters in Mountain View with an output of 1.6-megawatts. And now it plans to run Google Energy to buy and sell energy preferably from renewable sources to help it achieve its goal. "Right now, we can't buy affordable, utility-scale, renewable energy in our markets," Google representative Niki Fenwick said. "We want to buy the highest quality, most affordable renewable energy wherever we can and use the green credits... We don't have any concrete plants. We want the ability to buy and sell electricity in case it becomes part of our portfolio," he added.