Energy costs must really be getting to Google. In addition to its recently announced forays into geothermal energy and floating data centers, it’s also partnering with General Electric Co. to work on ways to make the power grid more reliable, and better able to support new forms of energy like wind farms and solar. The idea is to leverage Google’s software expertise to get the power grid to react as efficiently as a software-based smart grid.
The power grid in the U.S. is old and notoriously unreliable (think of California’s rolling blackouts or 2003’s regional power outages in the Northeast and Midwest). Such flakiness means that electricity expenses continue to rise, especially as power plants address the issue by upgrading their infrastructure and passing the costs along to consumers. It may seem strange for a software company to get involved in what at the outset appears to be primarily a hardware problem. But Google is probably one of the largest consumers of electricity in the nation, so it has a definite vested interest in getting more power cheaply, efficiently and reliably. But it also has the requisite expertise.
Orchestrating the power grid is alot like orchestrating data in a cloud-computing infrastructure. Both involve matching usage with (processing) power, and delivering service anywhere, anytime quickly and efficiently. And there is a precedent. IBM is leveraging SOA to help stabilize the power grid in the Pacific Northwest, and the results of its first pilot have been encouraging. Imagine if Google and GE took their combined expertise and rolled out something similar nationwide. The result would be more like a just-in-time energy grid, vs. the current system, where spikes in energy usage often result in brownouts and outages.
And if it works, the upshot will be that the in the future, electrical power will be delivered as reliably as Google’s homepage. (But probably not as cheaply.)
