Google ready to get its green wallet out

Google, the search giant best known for a). giving away things for free and b). not being Microsoft has decided to give away some of its cash to some cash starved green projects (does Greenbang’s attempt to build a green house out of empty plastic bottles count?).

Google’s green head Dan Reicher told Reuters the company is going to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in green energy projects that need a bit of a cash injection, with the ultimate end game of helping them boost their scale and make alternative energy cheaper than coal.

“There are a lot of technologies that get to the pilot scale and look promising, but the first few large commercial projects deploying those technologies, financing those can be extremely difficult,” Dan Reicher said in an interview at the Clean-tech Investor Summit in Indian Wells, California.

“Often the usual equity and debt players will say come back to us when you’ve demonstrated this at scale,” said Reicher, director of climate and energy initiatives for Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org.