Google invests £5m in EGS

Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) have received a ringing endorsement from Google this week, with the search engine juggernaut announcing that it is to invest more than $10 million (£5.39 million) into the hot-rock-drilling technology.

Dan Reichert, the former US Department of Energy’s assistant secretary for renewable energy and current climate change director at Google, suggested recently that while EGS may not be economically viable at the moment, it could one day become a major source of electricity.

"EGS is a very exciting opportunity," the Scientific American website quotes the expert as saying.

However, the chances of EGS becoming common-place in the near future are remote, he implied.

"We have a long way to go to bring it to commercial reality," he added.

Google was founded in the mid-1990s as an internet search engine and has since gone on to become on to become one of the largest public corporations in the world.

The company has a long history of attempting to use renewable energy, employing a scheme in 2006 in which they installed numerous solar panels across their campus in the US.