• The Wall Street Journal, Monday, March 9, 2009 12 PM

Why is Google moving into renewable energy, The Wall Street Journal's Alan Murray asks Eric Schmidt? "Because energy matters," replies the Google CEO, "and the way you solve the environment problem is you solve the energy problem. From a Google perspective it's the right thing to do for the world. It's also good for our business because we're in the information business. And a lot of the energy solutions involve a lot of information."

There's certainly money in energy information, but surely this wouldn't amount to much in terms of revenue for Google, right? "Well, but we're happy to make money everywhere," says Schmidt, adding that Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have been interested in renewable energy for a long time, particularly because Google's massive data centers command so much energy. When asked about those shareholders who don't think renewable energy is a valuable focus for the company, Schmidt replied that it's in Google's best interest to reduce energy costs, precisely because the company consumes so much energy.

In any event, the search giant's plan is get off carbon fuels completely by 2030. Roughly speaking, Schmidt reckons that the company needs to invest $3.5 trillion in clean energy over 22 years, and that would generate a savings of $4.4 trillion.

"If you invest in the right way, you can make money by doing this," he says.

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