SAN FRANCISCO – Google will become directly involved in deploying energy technologies, the company's director of climate initiatives said Monday.

The company has long supported and invested in renewable energy but kept its participation to greening its campus and funding several solar, wind and geothermal companies. In September, Google announced it was internally developing a new mirror for solar thermal plants. Now, the company may wade even further into the energy sector.

"We'll make a step soon into energy projects," Dan Reicher, director of climate change and energy initiatives at Google, told a group of energy experts assembled in the cafeteria at the company's swanky San Francisco office.

That could mean Google starts directly financing power plants. Throughout the energy innovation event, which also featured energy leaders from Stanford, MIT and UC Berkeley, Reicher stressed the importance of going beyond just research and development to deploying innovative energy technologies.

"Energy innovation to me means a real pipeline that goes from basic research to applied research to demonstration projects to the scale up and from there to full commercial deployment," Reicher said. "It's a long pipeline and to be honest we don't do a very good job of moving technologies through this pipeline."

Reicher said the Googlers have even coined a clever phrase to describe their vision of energy policy: "from light bulb to light bulb." They want to help move new technologies from the idea (the first light bulb) to the product (the second light bulb).

He championed an idea bouncing around Congress to create a Clean Energy Deployment Administration, which would help green tech companies get large power plants built.

But with a ballooning federal deficit and rough economy, it's hard to know where the money will come from. Reicher and the other panelists agreed that energy R&D funding should be around $15 billion a year.

MIT physicist Ernie Moniz warned several times that the current increase in energy research came courtesy of the stimulus bill, which won't be around forever.

"We're going to have to see what happens after these next two years because what we need is not a drop but a further increase in RD&D funding commensurate with the task at hand," Moniz said.

One idea for raising funds is to shift it from other places within government through standard appropriations, but Moniz suggested a different kind of funding base. A small charge could be added to electricity usage, which would add up to a very large sum – the Office Space funding model.

Charging about four-tenths of a cent per kilowatt on the 3,669,919 million kilowatt hours of electricity used in the United States would yield the $15 billion dollars the energy researchers want. That would essentially be a 5 percent tax on the average cost of a kilowatt hour.

Moniz said the idea had worked before. A successful program taxed natural gas transmission across state lines to fund the non-profit Gas Research Institute, beginning in 1976.

Image: A mirror being placed at Brightsource's Israeli demonstration facility. Google has invested in Brightsource and other solar thermal players like eSolar.

See Also:

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter, Google Reader feed, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.**