Last year, Google invested more than $915 million in clean energy projects — solar, wind and transmission.

That’s a lot of money, even for Google, which had $38 billion in revenues in 2011. The investments don’t appear to be core to the company’s mission of organizing information, and they have attracted criticism, as well as some careless reporting, implying that the Internet giant is exiting the alternative energy business.

Google and the Department of Energy (DOE) have funded a massive project to generate geothermal power from a dormant volcano in Central Oregon. AltaRock Energy of Seattle and Davenport Newberry Holding of Stamford Connecticut are overseeing the geothermal project for clean energy. Google and DOE have already invested $43 million in the volcano power project.

Renewable resources and non renewable resources are at two ends of a tug-of-war battle. While the latter is presently being used to an exhaustive extent, the former is still trying to find a prominent place in the list of energy sources. Conventional sources like coal have been used for a number of decades to power industries and homes. Its abundance and cheap cost is what propelled many to turn to it in the first place. The Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries saw huge amounts of coal being used to drive countries like Britain to the forefront of progress. Earlier, this natural resource was used in small quantities and coal could be mined from close to the surface of the earth. However, as demands increased, there was a need to drill ever deeper.

Google’s Renewable Energy Portfolion: $915m

Google has announced yet one more investment in clean energy (just following Warren Buffett’s two big solar power acquisitions). This time, they are investing $94 million into 4 different solar photovoltaic (PV) projects being built by Recurrent Energynear Sacramento, California. The combined PV projects have a capacity of 88 megawatts and will provide their electricity straight to the grid, unlike Google’s previous investments in rooftop solar PV. They should generate enough electricity to power about 13,000 US homes.

Despite dropping its internal solar technology development, Google continues to put money into solar power.

Assistant treasurer Axel Martinez said today that Google will invest $94 million into four commercial solar photovoltaic projects alongside private equity firm KKR. Google is investing equity in SunTap Energy, an entity created by KKR for solar investing.

The projects themselves are operated by Recurrent Energy, a company which specializes in commercial and utility solar photovoltaic projects. With a generating capacity of 88 megawatts, they will produce about 160 megawatt-hours per year, or enough to power 13,000 homes.

Google+ may be less than a year old, but New York Times bestselling author Chris Brogan is ready to crown it a game changer. His latest book, which will publish next week, is called Google+ for Business: How Google’s Social Network Changes Everything.

“Everything?,” we asked Brogan. He assured us, rather indignantly, that he hasn’t made a mistake with his book’s title.

Google+ has an obvious advantage in search results, presents unique opportunities for brands and is backed by deep pockets, he argues. And all of these factors make it a social media platform that will stick around in a big way.

Google has extended free voice calls in Gmail in the US and Canada to one more year, the company has announced.

Voice calls were originally added to Gmail in August 2010, with Google promising they will be free in the US and Canada “for the rest of the year.”

Google has added a new feature for Blogger users who have connected their blog with their Google+account, making it easier to share a post with their Google+ friends, too.

After you publish a post on Blogger, you’ll see a box containing a snippet from your post. Before sharing the post, you can choose which Google+ Circles you’d like to share the post with, add an additional comment if you like.

We already knew about YouTube’s redesign, which tech-savvy readers have been enabling for the past 10 days. As of now, however, the new YouTube is available to everyone.

Unlike parent company Google, which tends to roll out redesigns over a period of days, YouTube pressed the button and switched the homepage for every user worldwide at 4:30 p.m. ET Thursday.

So what’s the change all about? One word: channels. The world’s most popular online video service now sees itself as a descendent of cable TV, with millions of channels rather than hundreds — and it’s doing its darndest to encourage you to use it that way.

Google+ will allow multiple admins to manage a brand page “before 2012,” Kristoffer Sorensen, a Google marketing strategist, said on in a live Q&A on Wednesday.

Currently, brand pages are tied to one admin account that has total control over the page and profile. This has been a point of frustration for social media managers who have multiple team members updating their company social profiles.

Google has released yet another TV commercial to help demonstrate the features of its new social network, Google+. Like the other marketing efforts, the ad is slick, polished and even sort of funny. Unfortunately, it also demonstrates everything that’s wrong with Google+ in a just minute’s time. In fact, if the video hadn’t been posted to Google’s own YouTube channel, you may have almost wondered if it was a parody put out by Facebook PR.

The ad, published the day prior to Thanksgiving in the U.S., tells the tale of two Google+ users, Kyle and Lisa. In it, Kyle places Lisa into his “Love of My Life” Circle while Lisa puts Kyle in her own unfortunately named “Creepers” Circle. Oh, poor Kyle! Over time, though, it becomes clear that Lisa and Kyle’s relationship changes, as the ad shows Lisa moving Kyle into a variety of other Circles, including “Book Club,” “Guys With Cars” (shallow much, Lisa?), “Ski House,” “Maybes” and finally, “Keepers.” Cue the awwwwww’s, right?

Google has abandoned its effort to come up with better flat mirrors and power plant designs for producing electricity from the sun’s heat, but it is releasing its research results so that others could perhaps use it to create commercially viable solutions.