Google creating software to make plug-in hybrids more efficient  

Mother Nature News has a post on a some recent comments by Google's Dan Reicher on the company's interest in developing software for managing the recharging of electric vehicles - Google creating software to make plug-in hybrids more efficient.

In its continual climb to take over what seems to be just about every industry, Google announced today that the company is writing software that will help fully integrate hybrid electric cars into the power grid. The new software will help utility companies better manage the load of this burgeoning auto technology, particularly during peak hours.

"We are doing some preliminary work," Dan Reicher, Google's director of Climate Change and Energy Initiatives, told a Reuters reporter in an interview. "We have begun some work on smart charging of electric vehicles and how you would integrate large number of electric vehicles into the grid successfully … We have done a little bit of work on the software side looking at how you would write a computer code to manage this sort of charging infrastructure," he said in an interview on the sidelines of an industry conference.

Apart from plug-in technology, Google has been working on several green initiatives like developing custom solar panels that would reduce costs by up to 60 percent. The company is also looking at gas turbines that would run on solar power rather than natural gas, not to mention all the environmental work they're doing with Google Earth -- like helping conservation in Baja and adding a climate layer this week.

Google is using its Google Earth mapping tool to simulate on a 3D map of the world the predicted effects of climate change until the year 2100.

Using data provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the search giant created new layers for Google Earth showing the range of expected temperature and precipitation changes under different global emissions scenarios that could occur throughout the century.