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Comment by scottyah | Hacker News Reader

I love that they're using their insane hoard of money to improve the grid and accelerate the movement to a more renewable future.

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I mean what can possibly go wrong when a company that deprecates (and that's generous adjective) almost anything older than a couple years provides infrastucture for something that should last many decades?

Edit - karma losing posts should still be spelled correctly.

Yes it's true they deprecate things sometimes. It's also the same company that has supported it's core products like search and gmail for 2 decades. And last year there was like <1 hour of down time for YouTube.

But which groups do you think have a track record that qualifies them to take on this kind of work?

> and that's a generase adjective

'generase' is one of the weirder typos I've seen

They should consider returning it to shareholders via dividends and/or stock buybacks instead of wasting it on pie in the sky projects which they aren’t set up as a business to run long term. Alternatively, spin out a company and formalize the investment. Google won’t ever really care about anything that’s outside their wheelhouse, least of all about ultra low margin stuff like power.

Sure screw saving the planet, let’s give more money to shareholders instead.

They aren’t set up to “save the planet” either. A company they spin out could be set up for that though. And by “spin out” I don’t mean logically spin out under the alphabet umbrella, with unlimited checkbook. I mean spin out for real, live or die kind of a startup.

Google relies on power for their datacenters, so if they get into the generation of it, they'll further vertically integrate and save money. Once they dominate the power generation market, they can raise prices on others.

They already do massive buybacks.

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