Posted by Dave Klecha - Greenedia Editor on February 8, 2008 at 11:12:48 PM

One of the biggest hurdles to pushing an alternative energy technology is that it must compete with entrenched energy tech that has billions--literally, the economies of entire regions--behind it, which means it needs millions and billions in order to gain ground.  Most investors, in fact, even angels and VCs, are going to need to see new technologies and techniques working in scale, beyond the laboratory before they take their calculated risks.

That's where Google aims to become a major player, an enabler of sorts in the greening of America.  Where nascent technologies hope to supplement or replace our current energy technologies, but need a hand over the transom so to speak, Google's philanthropic arm wants to be there to provide the funding to bring scale to these technologies.

The Mountain View, CA-based company has long been passionate about the role of cleantech and alternative energy in the future of human endeavor.  Their corporate headquarters is partially powered by solar tree farms planted in their parking lots, and they're leading a major technology consortium to develop and deploy computing technologies that are dramatically more efficient than what is currently on the market.  So this kind of thing is no surprise, but the scale is certainly ambitious.

Also ambitious, and also needing major funding to make it over the hurdle into full funding and respectability is the prospect of using nuclear fusion to replace coal, fission, and other dirty and uncertain means to produce electricity.  A Canadian company hopes to make that a reality, and may do it in the next decade or so, according to VC Wal van Lierop.

General Fusion hopes to take a novel means of creating fusion in a laboratory setting (though by no means the physicists' dubious Holy Grail of fusion that can take place at room temperature, so-called "cold" fusion) and develop it into a viable technology that can produce more energy than it requires, the gold standard for any sustainable energy technology.  Getting to that gold standard however, will require a lot of the kind of money that Google and van Lierop are offering before it could begin to produce a return on the investment.

But with support like this, it's hard to imagine that these kinds of efforts could not succeed.