3p Contributor: Todd
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San Francisco City Summit Notes
Early Monday morning, a diverse group of business executives and government officials presented arguments for how San Francisco could leverage the incredible business ingenuity of this region to meet the climate challenge. In addition, Mayor Gavin Newsome presented his plans to make San Francisco a model for the rest of the world on how best to mitigate climate change through responsible business practices. Bank of America, Chevron, PG&E, Safeway and many others touted best practices such as alternative energy use, energy conservation, and employee education in an effort to reduce their carbon emissions.
While it was thrilling to see many large corporations openly expressing their efforts towards reducing environmental impacts, it quickly became apparent that real change happens not only from business solutions, but also government policy.
Google Energy Plan Includes Fleet of Plug-in Hybrids
With one of the first-ever demonstrations of a car’s battery providing energy back to a utility grid, Google.org (Google’s philanthropic arm) announced the company’s collaboration with battery manufacturer A123Systems, California energy utility PG&E, and Enterprise Car Rental. As part of the arrangement, Google will lease 100 modified Toyota Priuses for their employee car sharing program and sell the electricity stored in their lithium-ion batteries back to PG&E.
The cars had been converted to Plug-in Hybrid Electric vehicles (PHEV) using kits manufactured by Hymotion (which had been acquired by A123Systems earlier this year). The technology, known as vehicle-to-grid (V2G), allows for the bi-directional sharing of electricity between Electric Vehicles (EVs) and Plug-in Electric Hybrid Vehicles (PHEVs) and the electric power grid.
Google’s demonstration came a little more than two months after PG&E’s initial V2G showcase in April. Monday’s demonstration was part of Google’s adoption of alternative energy solutions at its headquarters – solutions which include a new 1.6 MW solar array which is expected to generate 2.6 gigawatts annually for the facility.
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