Biking around town is a great way to cut pollution while getting a little exercise, especially now that springtime weather is upon us. So tune up your bike, buckle your helmet, and find a bike-friendly route with the new “Bicycling” option from Google Maps.

This isn’t “one-size-fits-all” mapping that you’d use for a car trip. Instead, it focuses on the most appropriate bicycle route from point “A” to point “B”. For example, it can help you find quiet side streets that are more rideable than main thoroughfares, and steer you clear of brutal hills. And it will help you skip roads altogether if there are dedicated bike paths in your area.

The Google Maps "Bicycling" Interface

I tested it recently for a trip through the beach towns of LA’s Westside. Sure enough it mapped out a very sensible riding route, bypassing some especially congested intersections and using a bikes-only boardwalk for part of the trip.

There’s a helpful tutorial video on the Google Maps website for new users. There is also a “Biking Directions” gadget available that businesses can place on their websites, to help encourage ride-by customers. The system is still in its Beta version, so Google is collecting user feedback to streamline the system – but it’s a great way to make bicycle commuting more practical wherever you live.

^{eSolar is one of the early-stage companies Google is working with.}

Google has announced a plan to develop sources of renewable energy that will be cheaper than coal. The new initiative, RE<C, (renewable energy is cheaper than coal) will begin by focusing on solar power technology, and will also encompass geothermal energy production.

According to the Google.Org blog, of the early-stage companies they’ve begun to work with to drive down the costs of renewable energy are eSolar Inc. and Makani Power.

“We have gained expertise in designing and building large-scale, energy-intensive facilities by building efficient data centers,” said Larry Page, Google Co-founder and President of Products. “We want to apply the same creativity and innovation to the challenge of generating renewable electricity at globally significant scale, and produce it cheaper than from coal.”

^{Makani’s Power Kite}

Page added, “There has been tremendous work already on renewable energy. Technologies have been developed that can mature into industries capable of providing electricity cheaper than coal. Solar thermal technology, for example, provides a very plausible path to providing renewable energy cheaper than coal. We are also very interested in further developing other technologies that have potential to be cost-competitive and green. We are aware of several promising technologies, and believe there are many more out there.”

Page continued, “With talented technologists, great partners and significant investments, we hope to rapidly push forward. Our goal is to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that is cheaper than coal. We are optimistic this can be done in years, not decades.” (One gigawatt can power a city the size of San Francisco.)

“If we meet this goal,” said Page, “and large-scale renewable deployments are cheaper than coal, the world will have the option to meet a substantial portion of electricity needs from renewable sources and significantly reduce carbon emissions. We expect this would be a good business for us as well.”

Coal is the primary power source for many around the world, supplying 40% of the world’s electricity. The greenhouse gases it produces are one of our greatest environmental challenges. Making electricity produced from renewable energy cheaper than coal would be a key part of reducing global greenhouse-gas emissions.

“Cheap renewable energy is not only critical for the environment but also vital for economic development in many places where there is limited affordable energy of any kind,” added Sergey Brin, Google Co-founder and President of Technology.

Google has started a massive project of covering their campus with solar panels — almost all the buildings with have solar panels on their roofs. The image shows what the campus will look like when they are finished. Google estimates that the solar modules will provide 30% of the power for their headquarters. While it’s expensive, it’s been said that the project will be paid off in 7.5 years and with a life-span of 20–25 years for the solar panels, they’ll have many years to benefit from them. Via Wired News