Google Breaks Silence over Energy Use
Mounting speculation forced Google into revealing one of its best kept secrets in September: how much electricity its huge data centre and computing facilities actually consume.
In the past, Google has been secretive about its energy use. However, its continued silence lead to speculation and a report in The Sunday Times in 2009 claiming that every single Google search generates the same amount of carbon emissions as boiling a kettle of water for tea, so it has been forced to shed light on the issue to silence the theorists and dispel this inaccurate speculation.
In actual fact the figures Google has revealed illustrate that the world is using less energy as a result of the billions of operations carried out in Google data centres. Google states that people should consider things like the amount of Petrol and vehicle emissions saved when someone conducts a Google search rather than driving to the library, for example.
Google’s data centres all around the world continuously draw almost 260 million Watts of electricity in order to run Google searches, YouTube views, Gmail messaging and display ads on all it services. That is about a quarter of the output of one nuclear power plant – continuously! This does, however, include all Google operations worldwide, including the energy required to run its campuses and office parks but it’s enough (say utility companies) to power all the homes in one city of 100,000 to 200,000 houses.
Actually, if you think about the amount of business that is done and other activities that are performed using Google, everyday, 24/7, 365 days of the year, one quarter of one nuclear power plant is actually economical considering the alternatives i.e., all of that activity being done manually.
According to Google, people conduct more than 1 billion searches a day alongside numerous other downloads and queries but the average energy consumption per user is relatively small (about 180 watt hours per month, the equivalent of running a 60w light bulb for 3 hours). Google claims its energy use is around 50% of most other data centres and 25% of the energy it used in 2010 came from renewables. It is aiming for that figure to rise to 35% by 2012.
Google has invested nearly $US1 billion in renewable energy projects, including wind farms in North Dakota, California and Oregon, solar projects in California and Germany, and the beginning of a transmission system off the East Coast of America to foster the construction of offshore wind farms.
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