That’s the conclusion I’m drawing, anyway, from news that Google is investing heavily in another wind farm. We’ve talked before about Big Goog’s investment in wind farms here on the windswept states of the Great Plains. Now they’re in Oregon, sinking $100 million into a wind farm under construction near Arlington, Oregon. The facility will be the first such operation to use magnet based generators, which is a next generation technology said to improve the efficiency of the turbines. Google has dropped $350 million in wind farming overall. They say they’re interested ways to make the overall power grid more reliable. An investment like this also puts Google in the somewhat weird position of being a power utility: they can get a first option to buy this energy or profit from its sale.
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