Internet company Google retired its Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal fund on Tuesday as part of a ‘spring cleaning’ operation that saw it shut down several projects initiated by the company which it feels it can no longer successfully sustain.
Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal operated as part of Google.org, the firm’s philanthropic division, with the stated aim of making renewable energy, solar energy in particular, cheaper to use.
Businesses which garnered investment from Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal included solar power plant builder Brightsource, solar power technology company eSolar and geothermal drilling company Potter Drilling.
The announcement was made as part of a post in the official Google blog. The company stated: "At this point, other institutions are better positioned than Google to take this research to the next level. So we’ve published our results to help others in the field continue to advance the state of power tower technology, and we’ve closed our efforts."
The post continued: "We will continue our work to generate cleaner, more efficient energy-including our on-campus efforts, procuring renewable energy for our data centres, making our data centres even more efficient and investing more than $850 million in renewable energy technologies."