In a week of ludicrously large numbers beyond a normal human being's comprehension of what it will cost to barely survive the current economic catastrophe Google announced that - by its calculations - it will take $4.4 trillion to reduce America's dependence on fossil fuel by 88% by 2030 (and that's only 38% in cars).

While the world waited for the US Senate to vote on a patchwork rescue measure to save the global economy, Google Wednesday unveiled its "Clean Energy 2030" plan, which would substitute wind (heaven help the birds), nuclear and geothermic (a particular pet of Google's) for coal and oil to save an estimated $1 trillion between now and 2030.

Google has recently invested $45 million in alternate energy start-ups and already claims that it has identified $5 million in so-called building energy savings over two-and-a-half years. It also says its massive data centers are the "most efficient in the world," using only a fifth the power required by conventional facilities.

Google is supposed to average a Power Usage Efficiency (PUE) rating of 1.21 across six data centers and another that's close to a "perfect" 1.0 score. A typical data center has a PUE of at least 2.0.

Google says we spend more energy on a Google search than Google does responding.

The Green Grid pushes PUE as a standard.

New efficiency servers and PCs could reportedly cut energy consumption 10%-20% by 2010.

Anyway, Google's bigger "save the world" plan was written as a supposed talking point, and with a view to the next administration in Washington, by Jeffery Greenblatt of Google's non-profit Google.org.

Google has partnered with General Electric to lobby Washington on alternate energy.

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