Reicher and Google are also hardwired into President Barack Obama’s administration, which has made federal spending on energy efficiency and renewables a pillar of its economic-stimulus package. Reicher helped raise $2 million for the Obama campaign, as a leader of a group named Cleantech & Green Business for Obama. He spent last fall commuting to Washington, D.C., to help chart energy policy for Obama’s transition team and was reportedly on the short list to become Obama’s energy secretary. (The job ultimately went to Steven Chu, a physicist and Nobel Prize winner.)

Schmidt also advised the president on economic issues and served on his transition team. Gore, an unofficial energy adviser for Obama, sits on Google’s advisory board.

For all of them, it’s an article of faith that renewables and the smart grid won’t happen without billions in federal subsidies and incentives. “These stimulus packages will be big enough that our little corner, the one we’re working on, is a relative rounding error,” Schmidt said in a speech on renewable energy. “So that’s where the money comes from.”

In early December, Reicher led a group of five Google engineers and a policy counsel from Washington on a visit to GE’s Global Research Center in Niska­yuna, New York, outside Schenectady. The 525-acre campus, with 1,900 employees, is a nerve center of Immelt’s effort to keep GE at the forefront of technologies in which he wants the company to dominate. With a late-autumn ice storm downing power lines throughout upstate New York—and eerily encasing the GE lab in an ice-laced forest—two of the best-known brands of the old and new economies measured each other’s worth. The Google crew left their rooms at the GE guesthouse and dove into a series of morning meetings with their GE counterparts on enhanced geothermal power, plug-in vehicles, and smart-grid technology.

The Googlers were young and inquisitive—some of them still in their twenties—like brainy students on a field trip to the science museum.

The highlight of the day was a visit to GE’s smart-grid lab, a roomful of instruments, screens, and appliances designed to model what it would be like to integrate and automate the U.S. electricity network, top to bottom. A GE engineer, punching keys at a keyboard, alerts the network to a summertime surge in power demand, a “peak event” that triggers a concurrent spike in the price of electricity. The data flashes on an Eco Dashboard in someone’s home, and with the click of an icon, several appliances power down. As patterns emerge, the GE engineer explains, the system will program itself, so customers can select energy plans in advance, just like they pick cell-phone plans. The Google people are riveted.

“Let’s talk about the competition. What are the Japanese and Koreans doing?” a Googler asks.

“We have not seen anybody besides GE looking at energy optimization that reaches all resources” on the grid, re­sponds Juan de Bedout, the head of power-conversion systems at GE’s Glob­al Research Center. “We think this is a unique competitive advantage for us.”

As part of their collaboration, GE and Google will launch an advocacy campaign in the nation’s capital to push for more federal subsidies and incentives for green power. The government, Immelt says, must be a catalyst for change. “I would say this with humility, as I sit here today,” Immelt said. “Look, I’m a lifelong Republican; I believe in free markets. But I think that, to a certain extent, we worship false idols over time. There’s been no such thing, in all the businesses we do, as one in which the government hasn’t played some role. So let’s just be clear about that.”

On renewable power, Schmidt says much the same thing, without the humility. “I’m quite convinced that if you follow my reasoning, and if you take ad­vantage of the technological opportunities, the funding opportunities, and the apparent willingness of the U.S. government to write large checks in a series of crises,” he gushed in October, “we could do this on Monday.”