Energy R&D funding from "Lightbulbs to Lightbulbs"

(Condensed Remarks from the 2009 California Cleantech Open)

There are still power plants operating today that Thomas Edison could have seen with his own eyes. If he were to tour our electrical grid, he would recognize that too. As former Secretary of State George Shultz says, in energy "the past must not be prologue." Can we reinvent our energy system in only ten years? I think we can -- but we need to have a clear mission, we need to aim high, and we need substantial and sustained R&D funding.

This funding, coupled with tax incentives, loan guarantees, and other market mechanisms, is needed to drive innovation across the entire R&D pipeline -- from research, to development, to demonstration, to deployment, to full-scale commercialization. At Google we like to say, “from lightbulbs to lightbulbs" -- from the initial idea to real products. However you phrase it, investment is needed across that entire pipeline, especially from the government in the early stages where the energy industry often does not invest the large amounts needed to generate technological breakthroughs.

Since 1980 U.S. federal investment in energy R&D has dropped by 58 percent. Back then, 10 percent of the total government R&D investment was in energy. Today, the percentage has shrunk to only two percent. Recent signs in Washington are definitely positive. Earlier this year, President Obama added over $5.7 billion in 2-year stimulus funding for energy research, development, and demonstration. But this isn't enough, and it's not sustained. We're still on a 2-lane innovation road, not a superhighway -- and the road we're currently on is headed for a big cliff. Unless something changes, we're going to lose this significant funding after next year.

President Obama has called for $150 billion over 10 years for energy R&D. Some experts go even further -- Professors Dan Kammen and Gregory Nemet at UC Berkeley propose that annual energy R&D levels on the order of $30 billion will be necessary to address the climate challenge. And I was delighted to see recently that ARPA-E -- the new Department of Energy agency chartered to fund breakthrough ideas -- has made its first set of grants of $151 million for 37 projects. This is a great start, but it is only a start. We all need do our part to help convince our leaders in Washington to follow up on this down payment with substantial and sustained investment.

Posted by Bill Weihl, Green Energy Czar

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Finding flu vaccine information in one easy place

(cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

This year, it's especially important to have clear information on what you can do to prepare for the flu season. With this in mind, we are happy to share a new feature for the U.S. which allows you to more easily find locations near you for getting both the seasonal and H1N1 flu vaccine. After expanding Google Flu Trends to a total of 20 countries and 38 languages, allowing more people to see near real-time estimates of flu activity, we began brainstorming with the U.S. Department for Health and Human Services (HHS), their flu.gov collaborators and the American Lung Association on the flu shot finder and other ways Google can be helpful to people this flu season.

You can check out the flu shot finder at www.google.com/flushot. The same tool will also be available shortly on www.flu.gov and the American Lung Association websites. It's important to note that this project is just beginning and we have not yet received information about flu shot clinics for many locations. In addition, many locations that are shown are currently out of stock. We launched this service now in order to help disseminate information about locations where vaccines are available, and also to make more vaccine providers aware of the project so that they can contribute.


Especially given slower than expected vaccine production, we think it's important to bring together flu shot information in a coherent manner. We've been working with HHS, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and state and local health agencies to gather information on flu vaccine locations across the country, particularly for the H1N1 flu vaccine (both the nasal-spray vaccine and the shot). At the moment we have data for locations of flu vaccine directly from 20 states and counting. We are also continuing to add information from chain pharmacies and other providers in all 50 states; today, you'll find results from chains such as Walgreens, CVS and PDX participants, such as Kmart, Duane Reade, WinnDixie and Giant Eagle.

Of course you should still call flu vaccine providers ahead of time to find out more about availability and eligibility for the two vaccines.

We hope to continue providing you with relevant information to help keep you and your loved ones healthy.

Posted by Roni Zeiger, M.D., Product Manager and Jennifer Haroon, Product Marketing Manager

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Empowering the UK with Google PowerMeter

Electricity consumers in the United Kingdom can now access Google PowerMeter, a free software tool that provides consumers with information on how much energy their home is using. The software receives information from utility smart meters and in-home energy management devices and visualizes this information on a personalized iGoogle homepage. Today we're announcing both our very first UK utility partnership and our very first UK device partner.

Our utility partner, first:utility, is the only energy supplier in the United Kingdom to provide free smart meters to its customers, and is currently in the process of rolling them out across the country. To date, first:utility has over 30,000 customers signed up to its service. Starting in early November, all first:utility customers with smart meters will be able to sign up to use Google PowerMeter, empowering them with greater information about their home electricity use. According to Mark Daeche, first:utility’s Chief Executive, "At the end of the day, if you can’t measure and view your energy use, it’s very difficult to make savings.”

Google is also partnering with AlertMe, a self-install consumer device manufacturer and our first partner with a product available in the United Kingdom. Starting today, AlertMe customers in the UK can access their home’s data through Google PowerMeter on their iGoogle homepage. In just a few minutes consumers can access their home energy data from anywhere they can access the Internet. Pilgrim Beart, founder and CEO of AlertMe noted, “Our partnership with Google PowerMeter puts your home energy consumption right in front of you every time you go online.” Check out this video to learn more about how you can start monitoring your home energy use today.

With today's announcement, we've now signed up two device partners and ten utility partners serving five countries!

Posted by Ka-Ping Yee, Software Engineer and Jens Redmer, Business Development

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Will genomics help prevent the next pandemic?

The first outbreak of the new "swine flu" strain, now known as H1N1, earlier this year in Mexico caught the world by surprise. Public health officials around the world tried to stop the virus at the borders but were largely helpless. Shortly after, on the other side of the world from Mexico, I saw the health check posts in Cambodia at the airport and at a borderpost with Vietnam, right when the country found its first H1N1 cases which were flown in by US exchange students. The weapons used by the health officials to combat the spread of the virus were primarily paper survey forms and thermometers; the virus won, very quickly. Genomics is rapidly changing both the way diseases are diagnosed and the way medications and vaccines are developed - but will it give us the tools to prevent the next pandemic?

• What if countries where emerging infections originate, from Cameroon to Cambodia, could rapidly sequence suspect samples and discover new pathogens when only a few people have become sick?
• What if all such sequence data were immediately shared in a single global open access database?
• What if you could search for a string of sequence data and all associated data, annotations or publications as easily and effectively as a Google search?
• What if markers discovered for a new disease would quickly be incorporated into affordable hand held multi-pathogen diagnostic tests widely available at the point of care?
• What if the results of those tests were uploaded to a database where surveillance tools like Google Flu Trends could discover outbreaks?

Today the Public Library of Science, a mission driven, non-profit and open access publisher, presents "The Genomics of Infectious Disease" a collection of essays, perspectives and reviews that explores how genomics—with all its associated tools and techniques—can provide insights into our understanding of emerging infectious disease. This collection was produced with financial support from Google.org with the editorial independence and rigor of PLoS and the expert opinion of leading researchers.

In one piece Rajesh Gupta, Mark Michalski (of Stanford, but at Google.org last year) and I provide Google.org’s perspective and vision for how systematic application of genomics, proteomics, and bioinformatics to infectious diseases could predict and prevent the next pandemic. To realize this vision, however, we feel that a focused, coordinated and scaled-up effort would be required. We urge the community to unite under an “Infectious Disease Genomics Project,” analogous to the Human Genome Project, to accelerate today's impressive progress as reviewed by this cross-journal open access collection.

You can read more in this blog from PLoS and listen to a fascinating audio interview debate with with Jonathan Eisen, Siv Andersson, and Raj Gupta, led by Kirsten Sanford.


Posted by Frank Rijsberman, Google.org

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Pouncing on the iCat opportunity

As a relatively new philanthropy ourselves, Google.org continues to explore innovative and sustainable solutions to improving the lives and livelihoods of people in the developing world. This exploration often brings us into dialogue with many start-up social enterprises and other philanthropies trying to overcome challenges working directly with less advantaged populations. One such group, LGT Venture Philanthropy, has articulated a recurring theme: organizations with effective and innovative solutions to social and environmental problems often lack the manpower and expertise to implement these solutions in the most effective way, especially during the growth phase. They have come up with a creative solution: the iCats Program.

The iCats Program was designed to bridge the gap between philanthropic organizations or social enterprises in need of professional know-how and resources, and business professionals with the desire to apply their knowledge and experience to benefit the social sector, thus acting as “impact catalysts.” This is how the name iCats was inspired.

iCats are professionals from all over the world with diverse professional backgrounds who are willing to share their business expertise with carefully selected philanthropic organizations and social enterprises. LGT Venture Philanthropy created a web-based platform to match experienced professionals with specific needs in trusted partner programs.

In 2009, eight fellows are working in organizations in Africa, India, and Latin America. Peter Shrimpton, CEO of Heart in Capetown notes of the iCAT program, “Your funds may have mobilized us, but it is your fellows who are optimizing our performance. If your funds are the vehicle, your fellows are the fuel.”

I wanted to share with you that applications for the 2010 iCat Program are now underway. A fellow works 11 months on-site with a portfolio organization from February to December 2010 and receives regular mentoring from the LGT Venture Philanthropy team. In addition, a 4-day induction workshop brings all fellows together in the Swiss mountains.

The fellow positions for 2010 are now online on www.icatsprogram.com. Application deadline is 26th October 2009.

Posted by Mark Smolinski, Google.org

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Google Flu Trends expands to 16 additional countries

If you're like us, you're probably thinking a lot about how this year's flu season might affect you and your community. To help you out, we at Google.org are excited to announce the expansion of Google Flu Trends to 16 additional countries, including much of Europe. We've also made the site available in 37 languages. Flu is a global threat, affecting millions worldwide each year, so we're pleased to make this tool available in more regions and languages.

Last November, we launched Google Flu Trends in the United States after finding a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. By tracking the popularity of certain Google search queries, we are able to estimate the level of flu, in near real-time. While some traditional flu surveillance systems may take days or weeks to collect and release data, Google search queries can be counted immediately. Google Flu Trends provides an additional surveillance tool that may help public health officials and the public make more informed decisions about preparing for the flu season.

In the past year, we've expanded our coverage to include Mexico, New Zealand and Australia and have continued to see a good correspondence between our estimates and official flu activity data. In fact, our analysis of last season shows that Google Flu Trends had a close 0.92 correlation with official U.S. flu data.

An important aspect of Google Flu Trends is that we filter out terms that may be popular because people hear about them in the news. What we do not use in the models is a term like [swine flu] since people are more likely to type that into Google because they want to know more information about it, given the news headlines, and not because they actually have H1N1 or swine flu. For more information about how we built this model, take a peek at this video:



If you visit Google Flu Trends for the U.S., you'll notice that the flu season is starting early this year. For tips on how to stay healthy this season, please visit our friends at the U.S. CDC and the ECDC.

Posted by Matt Mohebbi and Dan Vanderkam, Software Engineers

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Open enrollment for Google PowerMeter partners

The Google PowerMeter team is pleased to announce an important milestone for our product -- open enrollment. This means that utilities can enable self-serve sign-up for customers to use the Google PowerMeter gadget. More users means improved feedback on our product and this will translate into an improved product experience. Here's how it works: If your utility has open enrollment enabled for your account, with just two simple steps you can have your usage data transmitted to Google and visible online via Google PowerMeter.

Yello Strom, a German utility and our first partner in Europe, is fully up and running with open enrollment. All of the customers who use Yello's smart electricity meter - the Sparzähler - can now also view their individual electricity consumption online using Google PowerMeter. With over 1.4 million customers, Yello is among Germany's top ten electricity companies and the very first company to offer commercial smart meters nationwide in Germany since 2008. Yello’s smart meter interacts with a PC to make energy consumption visible for the customer – both in real-time within their own household and online at fifteen-minute intervals. Expanding the number of customers who can sign up for Google PowerMeter is just one more way this forward-thinking utility is improving access to energy information. As Executive Director Martin Vesper put it, "We are now offering our customers even more ways to maintain an overview of their electricity consumption with the help of the internet. And when people know exactly what is going on with their energy usage, they can use energy efficiently without sacrificing convenience."

Other Google PowerMeter partners are also working towards open enrollment capabilities. Florida's JEA has built an open enrollment system and is actively rolling it out within their customer base. And National Information Solutions Cooperative (NISC), the latest addition to our strategic partners, is actively integrating Google PowerMeter into their offerings for all Utility Co-ops that they service.

Open enrollment and our recent device announcement mean that even more users can now see their electricity data to save energy and money!

Posted by Srikanth Rajagopalan, Product Manager

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Google PowerMeter's first device partner

Cross-posted to the Official Google Blog.

Today, we're very excited to announce we have secured our first official device partner. (That means having a smart meter installed by your utility is no longer a prerequisite for using Google PowerMeter!) For the last several months, a few hundred Google employees have been testing a number of in-home electricity monitoring devices. Those of us lucky enough to have one of these devices installed in our homes experienced first-hand how access to high-resolution energy use information drives meaningful behavior change. So we set out to make that data easier for everyone to access and understand by sending the collected data to our Google PowerMeter software.

The TED 5000 from Energy Inc. is an energy monitor that measures electricity usage in real-time (TED stands for "The Energy Detective"). As of today, we're pleased to announce that anyone in North America can purchase and install the TED 5000 and see personal home energy data using our free software tool, Google PowerMeter, from anywhere you can access the web including through iGoogle for mobile phones. (If you already have a TED 5000, you can download a free firmware upgrade to enable this functionality.)

Combined with Google PowerMeter, the TED 5000 device can help you understand your electricity usage to save energy and money. Energy Inc. is just our first device partner and if you are working for a company that manufactures energy monitors, we'd like to hear from you. Stay tuned for more!

Posted by Tom Sly, New Business Development & Charles Spirakis, Software Engineer

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Swine flu near you?

Well, there's now an app for that.

Today Google.org grantee HealthMap launched a new iPhone application called "Outbreaks Near Me" available for free download.

Curious about what disease outbreaks have been reported in your neighborhood? Or maybe in that city you're headed to for work or vacation? "Outbreaks Near Me" empowers users to track and report outbreaks of infectious disease near them in real-time. In addition to following the reports near you with an automatic alerting function, you can even become a disease detective yourself by reporting on outbreaks happening around you. It's the latest and greatest in grassroots disease surveillance.

Outbreaks Near Me pinpoints a user’s location and maps local outbreak reports.

HealthMap co-founder Clark Freifeld explains, "In releasing this app we aim to empower citizens in the cause of public health, not only by providing ready access to real-time information, but also by encouraging them to contribute their own knowledge, expertise and observations. In enabling participation in surveillance, we also expect to increase global coverage and identify outbreaks earlier."

HealthMap is based at Children's Hospital Boston. They launched this new application in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab. Please read HealthMap's press release for more information.

Posted by Corrie Conrad, Google.org

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Announcing 14 Geo Challenge Grant Recipients

When we launched our Geo Challenge Grants project last fall, we hoped our small grants program would provide nonprofits with the impetus and resources they need to take advantage of powerful online mapping tools like Google Earth and Google Maps. We were, without a doubt, not disappointed. In fact, we were overwhelmed by the hundreds of exciting and innovative geospatial applications that poured in from around the world, addressing diverse issues from renewable energy resources to education.

We are excited to announce that we have awarded grants to fourteen organizations with creative geo applications. These projects address important problems through creative and scalable geospatial applications. Grants are awarded either through the Google.org Fund at Tides Foundation or directly from Google.org.

Over the next six months to one year, these Geo Challenge Grant recipients will launch their projects and open-source all of the data, making both the projects and the data accessible to people all over the world. We hope these projects will inspire others to use geospatial platforms to address global problems:

Grantee	Project Name	Project Description	Amount
Academy for Educational Development	Data Visualization for Global Education	Using the Education Policy & Data Center's existing data system, AED will develop new visual tools for better communication of education patterns, inequality, and trends to policy makers and program developers	$21,600
Appalshop, Inc.	Wise Energy Forums	Mapping the renewable energy resources in Wise County Virginia to show the opportunity of a sustainable energy future locally	$5,000
Asha for Education	Interactive geospatial web-based portal for dissemination of information related to the education of underprivileged children in India	Developing an interactive geospatial web based portal for dissemination of information related to the education of underprivileged children in India	$6,000
CartONG	REDD Pilot – Elaboration and displaying of forest gains and losses in two target communities in Vietnam	Designing a pilot system for monitoring deforestation rates for Central Highlands of Vietnam. The project will carry out forest inventories and calculate carbon stocks using models	$25,000
e-Geopolis	e-Geopolis Data Dissemination Project: Urban Growth in Africa and India, 1950-2020	Enhancing the quality and quantity of urbanization data for communities of 10,000 people in India and Africa	$50,000
Esperanza del Barrio	Street Vendor Mobile Mapping	Developing a mapping application and website that will accept multi-user texts to map and update street vendor locations, integrating data into websites like Yelp and Urbanspoon, and providing information about access to healthy foods to the community	$21,600
Green Belt Movement	The Green Belt Movement Tree Planting Project Mapping in Kenya	Creating a web-based system to visualize and monitor the Green Belt Movement supported community tree nurseries and associated tree planting sites in Kenya	$50,000
International Snow Leopard Trust	Climate Change Impacts on Snow Leopard Range: Prioritizing Conservation Efforts to Mitigate Human-Wildlife Conflict	Displaying different climate change scenarios in regions of China where the snow leopard lives to prevent human-snow leopard conflict	$5,000
King's College London	Mapping the potential of global hydropower to sustain renewable energy demands, the risks imposed by climate change and strategies for adaptation through land cover management	Mapping the global distribution of dams, contributing watersheds and the role of protected areas and community reserves in providing water-based environmental services to these dams	$25,000
Marine Conservation Biology Institute	Renewable Energy at Sea: Best Places for Wind, Wave & Current Generation in US Waters	Creating a map of offshore wind, wave and current renewable resources as well as shipping lanes, marine sanctuaries, and aquaculture that will highlight the most favorable areas for development	$5,000
Point Reyes Bird Observatory	Biodiversity Futures: Mapping Biological Responses to Climate Change	Building a dynamic and user-driven online modeling application using existing avian, climate, vegetation, and land use change data to show deviation of avian migration based on climate change scenarios	$25,000
Royal University of Phnom Penh	Mapping Healthcare Centres in Cambodia	Mapping the health centers in the country's capital city (clinics, services, contact info, languages, etc) and using this as the foundation for a Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) emergency system	$5,000
Sri Lanka Wildlife Conservation Society	To develop a dynamic Geo Portal interfaced with Google Earth and climate change data to provide a “one stop shop” Internet database for Asian elephant conservation and to identify individual elephants through an automated identification program	Developing a dynamic Geo Portal with climate change data to provide a “one stop shop” Internet database for Asian elephant conservation and to identify individual elephants through an automated identification program	$15,000
UK Consortium on AIDS & International Development	Mapping availability of HIV, AIDS and TB services in Africa	Using the Ushahidi platform, it will map organizations providing HIV, AIDS and TB related services in Kenya and create a tool that enables organizations without experience of mapping to publish data on HIV, AIDS and TB services in their own countries	$40,800

Posted by Adam Borelli, Associate, Google.org

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