Google is probably known best for being a powerful search engine, a quirky-cool corporation rolling in cash and an implementer of web-development dreams, and for good reason. (Seriously, how awesome is Google Analytics?) But among its plethora of capabilities, the role of “purveyor of renewable energy” sometimes gets lost in the mix. In late 2007, Google caused a hubbub by announcing that it would create an initiative to develop electricity from renewable energy sources that would be cheaper than the electricity powered by coal, a move that would complement its anticipated clean tech investments. This initiative, known appropriately as RE<C, was to focus initially on creating advanced solar thermal power, wind power, geothermal systems and other technologies. Now, according to this Reuters article, Google’s in-house engineers have narrowed their attention to solar thermal, and a test project is just around the corner.

“We are looking at ways of cheaply getting to much higher temperatures and also making the heliostats, the fields of mirrors that have to track the sun, reflect the sun, keep it focused on the target we are trying to heat up — make those much, much cheaper. And I think we’ve made some really interesting progress in the last six to nine months,” he [Bill Weihl, Google’s “Green Energy Czar” and the man in charge of the initiative] said.

Google’s investment has been modest, so far. The company has put less than $50 million into clean energy start-ups, while the efforts of Weihl’s group are probably about $10 million or $20 million. Deploying technology on a large scale, however, would not be cheap, he said.

If the test project is successful, “we’ll see whether we or us in combination with other people are prepared to fund much, much bigger facilities, or if we want to get a few more years’ experience before we really start to scale it up,” said Weihl.

Google’s already proved its solar intentions with its 1.6MW PV installation in July 2007, the largest U.S. corporate installation at the time, and its $130 million investment in eSolar, a Pasadena, CA-based company offering “Utility-Scale Solar Power.” For a company like Google, it would appear that creating an in-house renewable energy R&D group of engineers to realize its world-saving, profit-making dreams is naturally the next step.