When Larry and Sergey laid out their vision for Google.org, they hoped that this "experiment in active philanthropy" would one day have an even greater impact on the world than Google itself. They committed resources from Google's profits, equity and substantial employee time to this philanthropic effort, and they created the mission: "to use the power of information and technology to address the global challenges of our age." They structured Google.org so that in addition to traditional grant making, it can also invest in for-profit companies, advocate for policies and, most important, tap into Google's strengths: its employees, products and technologies. At first I was skeptical about "going corporate," but I came on board convinced that Google could make real progress on these issues. I think we have made an excellent beginning, but it is just a very few steps on a long path.

Now, three years after Google.org was founded, we've been reviewing our progress, and how best to take things forward. It's clear that I am most effective in helping to identify "big ideas" and potential partners, as well as raising awareness about society's biggest challenges. I am therefore very excited to become Google's Chief Philanthropy Evangelist. I think this is the highest contribution that I can make both to Google.org and to fighting the urgent threats of our day: from climate change to emerging infectious diseases, to issues of poverty and health care. By focusing my energy outwards I hope to be able to spend more time motivating policy makers, encouraging public and private partnerships, and generally advocating for the changes that we must make as a global society to solve these problems. Long-time Googler Megan Smith will take over day-to-day management of Google.org, joining as General Manager to lead us through this transition, in addition to her existing role as Vice President of New Business Development.

One of the first things that Megan will focus on is how Google.org can best achieve its mission. During our review it became clear that while we have been able to support some remarkable non-profit organizations over the past three years, our greatest impact has come when we've attacked problems in ways that make the most of Google's strengths in technology and information; examples of this approach include Flu Trends, RechargeIT, Clean Energy 2030, and PowerMeter. By aligning Google.org more closely with Google as a whole, Megan will ensure that we're better able to build innovative, scalable technology and information solutions. As a first step, Google has decided to put even more engineers and technical talent to work on these issues and problems, resources which I have found to be extraordinary. In this global economic crisis, the work Google.org is doing, together with our many colleagues around the world, to help develop cheap clean energy, find and fight disease outbreaks before they sweep the globe, and build information platforms for underserved people globally, is more important than ever. We stand behind the commitment made in 2004 to devote 1% of Google's equity and profits to philanthropy, and we will continue to iterate on our philanthropic model to make sure our resources have the greatest possible impact for good.

Posted by Dr. Larry Brilliant, Chief Philanthropy Evangelist, Google.org

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Just one week after launching Google's energy information campaign, we kicked off our first joint smart grid event with GE, a larger clean energy collaboration we announced last fall. Our timing was fortuitous; the event took place just as President Obama signed an historic economic stimulus bill that includes $11 billion to modernize the electricity grid.

Getting energy information into the hands of consumers requires reworking the electricity grid to make it smarter. At yesterday's event, hosted in Google's Washington office, experts explored what the fundamental elements of a smarter grid should be -- from empowering consumers with information, tools, and choices to manage their energy use, to creating an open system that encourages innovation, to enabling a massive scale up of renewable energy sources and plug-in vehicles. We also explored the government's role in accelerating these efforts. Our panelists were enthusiastic about the opportunity created by the stimulus, but also noted the government's challenge of getting the money out the door in an effective and efficient manner.

Some highlights from the event:

• GE's film clip highlighting a smart grid project in Oklahoma
• An appearance by Carol Browner, President Obama's senior energy official in the White House, who noted with delight the packed crowd of over 450 people
• Former astronaut and current Googler, Ed Lu, making the case for open standards and user access to energy information on our technology panel
• Our very own Dan Reicher shamelessly punning that "we want to help build a fridge to the 21st century," a play on Bill Clinton's '96 campaign mantra
  

To stay plugged into our energy information campaign and learn about developments along the road to a smarter grid, be sure to join our Google Group.

UPDATE: Watch the event video on YouTube.

Posted by Michael Terrell, Google.org Program Manager

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We must quickly develop low-cost renewable and efficient energy technology to avoid the devastating effects of climate change. This requires a strong financial commitment to clean energy research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) to achieve big breakthroughs.

Historically such funding has been anemic. After a peak in 1978 of $7 billion, U.S. government funding for energy RD&D dropped by more than 70%. Corporate RD&D fell even more, and funding in the early 2000s totaled just 0.3% of sector revenue, compared to 15% in the biotech sector. Is it any wonder the energy sector has struggled to make progress?

What level of energy RD&D funding is needed? Kammen and Nemet look at several different metrics and suggest that a sustained level between $20-40 billion is needed to reinvigorate the field. Recent activities push in the right direction: 2008 funding reached $3 billion, 50% higher than during the early 2000s, and the stimulus bill recently signed into law adds $3.25 billion in new RD&D funding for clean energy. But to have a truly transformative effect, investment needs to climb even higher.

In addition, without emphasizing the "R" in RD&D, we will produce only incremental improvements. We need to prime the innovation pump in order to produce more high-quality ideas that produce radically better (and cheaper) technologies. This will provide long-term job growth, and also increase consumers' buying power, stimulating the economy.

Funding must also be coupled with long-term demand for clean technology. This gives companies confidence their investments will pay out, and assures students entering the field that jobs won't evaporate. Research must also focus more on clean tech; in recent years only 40% of energy RD&D funding has gone to renewable energy and energy efficiency.

At Google we've learned some that might be successfully applied to energy:

• "Put the user first and all else follows." For instance, customers care about saving money, but only if it's easy to measure. Providing ways to cheaply monitor energy consumption is a powerful first step.
• "Great just isn't good enough." Cost-parity for renewables is required for long-term competitiveness, but to replace conventional technology we must develop renewable electricity cheaper than coal, the least expensive fossil fuel.
• "Launch early and often." Instead of waiting for perfection, get new technologies into the marketplace quickly, then improve through iteration.
  

These strategies will make sure that the widest possible set of ideas are considered, increasing the number of breakthroughs. A "fail fast" policy would allocate people to the great ideas, with high-impact results guaranteeing continued funding, particularly at the critical demonstration stage where many technologies fail to attract sufficient capital. Carrying projects over this "Valley of Death" to full commercialization will ultimately result in the best, lowest-cost technologies rapidly reaching the market. For the sake of the planet, clean energy can't arrive soon enough.

Check out this excellent complementary set of recommendations recently published by Harvard's Belfer Center.

Posted by Jeffery Greenblatt, Climate and Energy Technology Manager

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A guest post from Howard White, Executive Director, International Initiative for Impact Evaluation:

In the foreign aid business, it's very important to answer the question, “Was this a successful project?” because donors need to know where to target their scarce resources. Unfortunately, the answer to this question has frequently been, “Well it must be, we spent loads of money and employed lots of consultants." This problem has been most recently highlighted by the Centre for Global Development’s report, "When Will We Ever Learn?". Billions of dollars are spent on development interventions each year with little evidence on whether they work or not.

I started my own academic career looking at aid impact at the macroeconomic level. In my own defense, I can say that, starting with my PhD, I criticized the over-aggregated cross-country regression approach, arguing instead for careful country-level analysis of macro impact that could pick up on both context but also the many channels – both money and ideas – through which aid affects development outcomes. Having published a couple of widely ignored books pursuing this approach, I became increasingly convinced that aid impact had to be examined from the bottom up. That is a systematic analysis of, if not all interventions, then enough to be able to make authoritative statements about whether the aid program is working or not. This might seem like a lot of work; but then so is measuring GDP and we do that.

But there are two problems to implementing a bottom up approach. The first is that evaluation design is often poor when it comes to measuring impact. The second problem is that most agencies do not systematically compile evidence across interventions. It is symptomatic of a culture of producing evaluations as a bureaucratic requirement, not as a management or learning tool.

It is to tackle these two problems - the lack of evidence and the failure to synthesize what evidence there is into policy-relevant lessons – that the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) has been created. Google.org has been one of our early funders.

The bulk of 3ie funding is going to help expand our knowledge about what works by supporting new impact studies, focusing on what we call the enduring questions of development. We are in the process of a consultative exercise to identify these questions – to which you can contribute by visiting our website. We will also have an open window for studies on other topics, for which the first request for proposals went out recently. Please visit our web site and join the conversation!

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(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

Imagine how hard it would be to stick to a budget in a store with no prices. Well, that's pretty much how we buy electricity today. Your utility company sends you a bill at the end of the month with very few details. Most people don't know how much electricity their appliances use, where in the house they are wasting electricity, or how much the bill might go up during different seasons. But in a world where everyone had a detailed understanding of their home energy use, we could find all sorts of ways to save energy and lower electricity bills. In fact, studies show that access to home energy information results in savings between 5-15% on monthly electricity bills. It may not sound like much, but if half of America's households cut their energy demand by 10 percent, it would be the equivalent of taking eight million cars off the road.

Google’s mission is to "organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful," and we believe consumers have a right to detailed information about their home electricity use. We're tackling the challenge on several fronts, from policy advocacy to developing consumer tools, and even investing in smart grid companies. We've been participating in the dialogue in Washington, DC and with public agencies in the U.S. and other parts of the world to advocate for investment in the building of a "smart grid," to bring our 1950s-era electricity grid into the digital age. Specifically, to provide both consumers and utilities with real-time energy information, homes must be equipped with advanced energy meters called "smart meters." There are currently about 40 million smart meters in use worldwide, with plans to add another 100 million in the next few years.

But deploying smart meters alone isn't enough. This needs to be coupled with a strategy to provide customers with easy access to energy information. That's why we believe that open protocols and standards should serve as the cornerstone of smart grid projects, to spur innovation, drive competition, and bring more information to consumers as the smart grid evolves. We believe that detailed data on your personal energy use belongs to you, and should be available in an open standard, non-proprietary format. You should control who gets to see your data, and you should be free to choose from a wide range of services to help you understand it and benefit from it. For more details on our policy suggestions, check out the comments we filed yesterday with the California Public Utility Commission.

In addition to policy advocacy, we're building consumer tools, too. Over the last several months, our engineers have developed a software tool called Google PowerMeter, which will show consumers their home energy information almost in real time, right on their computer. Google PowerMeter is not yet available to the public since we're testing it out with Googlers first. But we're building partnerships with utilities and independent device manufacturers to gradually roll this out in pilot programs. Once we've had a chance to kick the tires, we'll make the tool more widely available.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to providing consumers with detailed energy information. And it will take the combined efforts of federal and state governments, utilities, device manufacturers, and software engineers to empower consumers to use electricity more wisely by giving them access to energy information.

Posted by Ed Lu, Engineering Team

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