The Case for Brainy Power

A clean-energy economy will require lots of new hardware—sleeker wind turbines, more efficient solar panels, recharging stations for electric vehicles. It'll also require smarter software, to efficiently guide energy to where it's most needed. Always ambitious, Google hopes to be the architect of this software. Heading up its effort is Dan Reicher, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Energy who now serves as director of climate change and energy initiatives at Google .org, the company's philanthropic arm. NEWSWEEK's Fareed Zakaria spoke with him about the promise of the "smart grid" and more:

ZAKARIA: You ' ve worked in both government and the private sector. To get to a clean-energy future, which do you think has the bigger role to play?
REICHER: I think it's both. There are often large barriers to moving new energy technology into the marketplace. It takes a combination of policy, technology and finance.

Google has made noise recently about the energy grid. Why is that such an important topic?
The electric grid is in many ways the backbone of our economy. Beginning in Thomas Edison's time, we've built a massive system to both generate and move electricity around the country, from nuclear-power plants and coal-fired generating facilities, across a huge infrastructure of wires and into people's homes. However ... in many ways [the grid] isn't up to the task that we're asking it to take on in the next couple of decades … If we're really going to take advantage of renewable energy, we have to build substantially more transmission capacity to move wind-generated electricity from the Dakotas to Chicago or solar-generated power from the Southwest to L.A.

Why is " transmission capacity " a stumbling block?
We simply don't have enough power lines to move large quantities of green electricity from where it exists to where it's needed. So we've got to build more power lines to take advantage of wind and solar and geothermal energy.

But we also have to do it in a smarter way, right?
Right. We've also got to build a more intelligent grid. Electricity generally flows in one direction, from where it's generated to where it's used, but increasingly we want to be able to send electricity in multiple directions. For example, if we have a fleet of millions of plug-in vehicles, we've got to have a grid that not only knows how to fill up the batteries with electricity, but one where the same vehicles can send electricity back to the grid when it needs it. They can serve as a large storage capacity for the grid.

What are you doing at Google to improve things?
We launched a partnership with General Electric, for example, which brings together GE's energy hardware and Google's information software.