Google unveiled an energy plan last week, hoping to run the US on mostly clean energy (depending on how you classify Nuclear power) by 2030. To say its extremely ambitious is an understatement. Lets take it apart and see what types of game changing events it takes to make it happen.

The first, and biggest thing, is a reduction across the board, reducing energy consumption by 33%. From air conditioning and heating, lighting, cooking, refrigeration, and entertainment.

If we figure a 1% per year efficiency increase every year in terms of air conditioners, heaters, refrigeration, etc, we’ll see a 22% decrease in power consumption compared to 2008 usage.

For things like lighting, entertainment, computing, we tend to see big steps rather than small ones. LCDs replaced CRTs - old 20″ CRTs used 100-150W, my 24″ LCD uses 65W. The next incremental upgrade is the LED-based LCDs, however power consumption can vary - some LED-based LCDs have power consumption higher than their traditional LCD counterpart, though most have lower power consumption, which is the drive to use them in laptops to save more power. The next major increase in efficiency we will hopefully see Organic LED (OLED) based displays start to show up in the next few years (though we’ve heard that for the last three or four years now). As OLED screen sizes start to increase and prices come down, larger flat panel displays will be available, driving down the energy consumption for home entertainment.

From there, OLEDs could even infiltrate lighting if they can manage to produce white OLEDs that have a long enough lifetime to further bring down the usage of lighting as a percentage of total electricity consumption.

Likewise, personal computing is getting smaller. While my 486 chip ran cool enough not to need a heatsink, my current quad core Q9450@3.2GHz requires a big heatsink and fan, and sucks a lot of power when at full load. But not everyone needs that speedy dual core. Intel has done a lot to reduce power consumption when idle, starting in notebooks back in the early Centrino days, and continuing today across all lines - servers, desktops and laptops. The days of a 2.4GHz dual core Intel Atom aren’t far away (2011?), and as for email, web, movies and video, that’s all people might need. Enthusiasts and gamers will always buy the fastest and the best, but that part of the market shrinks as more gamers move to consoles as well as the general movement away from power hugrier desktops to more efficient laptops.

Next up is the new energy demand on the grid - specifically plug-in electric hybrid vehicles, like the Chevy Volt. Google estimates they’ll be 42% of the US passenger vehicle fleet (also known as LDV or light duty vehicles) by 2030. Is it possible? Yes, but it requires PHEVs supplant 90% of LDV sales, which is feasible, if not higher - the only reason I can think of not buying an PHEV would be for the very cheap cars (sub $10K) and to those who live in very extreme rural environments where electricity is scarce (those who live off the grid) and its not worth it to use electricity instead of gas.

When it comes to energy consumption, I think Google is on track, and their plan is feasible. We will see increases in efficiency in things like household appliances, improvements in household lighting, and technology will provide for decreases in entertainment and technology. However, stand-by power is an important factor, and should be addressed as well (it doesn’t appear in their knol page about their plan).

Now we’re on to energy sources. The two biggest up and coming renewable sources are wind and solar, however, geothermal is lurking in the dark. Both have their obvious limits on usage. The issue from there is what to do about load matching, and how much backup capacity will be needed.

Lets start with solar. I’ve said before that I estimate grid parity will arrive sometime around the time that the freshly passed solar energy ITC expires at the end of 2017. Google is predicting 250GW worth of solar power installations, and an approximate 500TWh/yr worth of production (a capacity factor of 22%, which is entirely appropriate). Their forecasts show 66GW of domestic capacity being installed between 2010 and 2020, which might sound unreasonable - an average 6.6GW installed per year - but current research estimates that worldwide, there will be between 50 and 80GW of panels manufactured per year by 2015. I would venture to say that it would be more difficult to find the installers and construction workers required to install all those panels, whether they be in large or utility scale projects, or rooftop installations for homes and businesses. And nevermind the credit crunch when it comes to financing the projects. Recently, two leading solar power companies had their stocks downgraded because of expected oversupply in light of the worldwide economy and credit situation.

Next is wind, which is estimated at 380GW by 2030. The US DOE had done studies for 300GW by 2030, and they found it possible with a few minor issues. Google assigns a 30% capacity factor to the wind turbines, to generate approximately 1000TWh/yr. This seems slightly high, but assuming that turbine installers stick to the highest wind speed areas in the US and then sends the electricity to urban areas via 500kV lines, it seems feasible. A group of utilities have formed the Utility Wind Integration Group, who’s goal is to advance the technology and application of wind into the power grid. In a study from November 2003 they stated that,“…the results to date also lay to rest one of the major concerns often expressed about wind power: that a wind plant would need to be backed up with and equal amount of dispatchable generation. It is now clear that, even at moderate wind penetrations, the need for additional generation to compensate for wind variations is substantially less than one-for-one and is often closer to zero.” This bodes well for wind, since it will be possible to integrate wind into the grid without having to build a large standby capacity in case the wind decides to not blow.

Finally, with geothermal, Google invested $10M USD into Enhanced Geothermal systems. The difference between traditional geothermal systems, of which the US estimates there is a total of about 10GW worth of recoverable energy from traditional geothermal, is that with the EGS, you fracture hot rocks and pump water down into the earths surface, instead of depending on naturally occurring sources of water to be in the right place to become heated enough to turn into steam. Google predicts that of the 80GW of geothermal production in the US, 65GW will be from Enhanced Geothermal systems, and the total TWh produced from all Geothermal systems would exceed that of solar power because of the much higher capacity factor of Geothermal systems (between 89-97% CF, compared to solar’s 22% and wind’s 30% CF).

Still, the ultimate issue with solar and wind is availability - how do we use the power its putting out without a massive amount of overbuilding and tons of power lines to keep everything balanced between production regions and consuming regions. Discussions are up for everything from large scale batteries and Vehicle-to-Grid technology to potenial energy storage systems (water reservioirs, flywheels, etc). Google estimates this could add $20/MWh, compared to the pricing range between $35/MWh for off-peak power and up to $200/MWh for peak power under the highest demand periods (during the summer when the need for power for air conditioners is highest). While nuclear and geothermal power could be used for part of the base, wind  would also need to make up a part the total baseload. Solar (PV and concentrated with auxiliary thermal storage) would be well suited for matching peak demand, as well as shaving down the base usage during the 9 months out of the year its not summer.

The key to Google Energy plan energy efficiency as well as smoothing out the generation of intermittent sources like wind and solar. I’m confident the prices of wind and solar will come down enough and efficiency will go up, as we figure out how to make the products more robust, reduce overhead as production scales up, and material substitution to reduce the cost of parts.