The western half of the United States has a deep-rooted distrust of government. The rich geeks of California especially, as Paulina Borsook documented in her 2000 book, Cyberselfish, have a snappish, libertarian relationship with it – even though the smooth roads, clean water and quality infrastructure they take for granted were provided by government funds, as were the beginnings of the technical base (computers, the internet) on which their businesses were built.

It seems as though the richer and more successful the geek the more he believes he can do a better job allocating funds and building stuff than government can. And so we come to this week's announcement that Google is investing tens of millions of dollars in the Atlantic Wind Connection, on top of a prior $40m (£25m) investment in windfarms in North Dakota. The logic behind the Atlantic project: most of the US's population centres are along the north-east coast; transmission losses make windfarms in the midwest and beyond too distant to power those energy-hungry areas; there's lots of wind a lot closer just offshore in the Atlantic. But without cables in place to carry the electricity generated to the existing power grid, what's the point of building windfarms? The investment Google and two other companies are making is aimed at getting that connection started, making the whole project more viable and therefore more likely to happen sooner rather than later.

Obviously, this is not an investment that's going to benefit Google immediately – it will take years and billions of dollars before the project is complete. And it may never benefit the company directly by powering Google installations. But if the project is successful, the technology it develops will doubtless be used elsewhere in locations that are better suited to the company's needs.

We all like to imagine that using the internet saves on fuel; Nicholas Carr's meme about Second Life avatars consuming as much electricity as the average Brazilian has been largely debunked. Even so, American data centres still consumed more power than American televisions in 2006, and despite increased technical efficiency their hunger for power continues to rise. Energy is a mission-critical need for Google, so investing to help ensure a sustainable future supply of electricity is merely sound business sense. (Don't forget, it's not just data centres; it will have to have power for all those robot cars!) This seems to me comparable to hedging against future risk by buying currency contracts, or to investing in basic research, as IBM, Xerox and AT&T all used to do at one time. Is it more blue-sky for Google to seed windfarms than for IBM to have invented the scanning tunnelling microscope?

In 2008, Google could contain its costs and secure its supply by building on the banks of the Columbia river in The Dalles, Oregon. Now, the competition for such sites is ramping up (Microsoft and Yahoo! have both built centres along that same river) and at some point a new approach is clearly going to be needed.

Earlier this year, New Yorker writer Ken Auletta noted in his book, Googled, that if your industry hasn't been disrupted by Google yet it will be soon. Privacy advocates in particular criticise Google for collecting information on a scale that ought to be the envy of major governments. You could accordingly argue that providing seed funding to kickstart building a new national infrastructure is yet another example of Google's ever-extending grasp. And maybe it is. But in this case it's hard to argue that it's a bad thing. Given the twin realities of climate change and the limited supply of fossil fuels, developing sources of clean, renewable energy is a national priority in any case. Projects that should have begun much sooner continue to face extensive delays due to local (and national) politics. The electricity industry will be disrupted with or without Google. The most likely situation is that Google's investment will simply be lubricant to help speed up change that is fundamentally needed.