The United States Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has given Google the green light to sell electricity and related services in the US. You might rightly wonder why Google would want to get into the power business and act as a utility – you think they would have better ways to make money.

Google says it wants to make itself carbon-neutral. Given the large number of data centres it operates, with probably thousands of servers in each, one could imagine the grand scale of Google’s electricity consumption. According to Google’s official blog, Google’s engineers did some analysis and found that an average Google search query consumes “about 1 kilojoule of energy and emits about 0.2 grams of carbon dioxide”. Obviously each search is tiny in isolation but multiply this figure by the billions of searches that it handles and it is clearly a big deal.

FERC’s approval gives Google the right to install as many solar panels as it likes in its quest to achieve carbon-neutrality. It also means that should Google generate lots of surplus solar power it could effectively resell this on the market; in other words Google could become a solar power generator and a net contributor to the electricity grid.

Google is already involved in energy in many ways, with applications like Google PowerMeter to assist consumers better manage their household energy consumption directly from their iGoogle homepage. Google has already signed up ten utility companies in North America and Europe to allow smart meters in their customers’ homes communicate with PowerMeter. There are also a couple of companies such as AlertMe in the UK selling self-install power management devices that are pre-configured to work with Google PowerMeter.

However, Google’s motives might not be entirely altruistic in helping the world use less energy; there is no doubt an excellent opportunity for Google to position itself as a large scale provider of energy management services to consumers and businesses around the world.