Back in February we reported on a minor controversy over the energy consumed by running a Google search. Urs Hölzle, Google’s Senior Vice President, Operations, has just posted new figures on the Google blog measuring the CO2 impact of a range of everyday activities in terms of the equivalent number of Google search operations. The carbon footprint of the PDF version of a daily newspaper, we’re told, is equivalent to 850 Google searches; a glass of orange juice is 1050 searches, and for 10,000 searches you could take the average US car for a five mile drive. If you can manage 3,100,000 search operations, your CO2 emissions will be comparable to the monthly electricity consumption of an average American household.
Insisting on Google’s green credentials, Hölzle argues that energy consumption in Google’s datacenters is less than half the industry average, and that it’s probable that your own PC will consume more energy in the time it takes to return a search request than that consumed by Google’s own systems in executing the search.
Google’s corporate Efficient Computing page takes up the subject, declaring “Sustainability is good for the environment, but it makes good business sense too”, with a five-step plan to continue improving the company’s environmental responsibility:
- Minimize electricity used by servers
- Reduce the energy used by the data center facilities themselves
- Conserve precious fresh water by using recycled water instead
- Reuse or recycle all electronic equipment that leaves our data centers
- Engage with our peers to advance smarter energy practices
The final word from Google: “Being “green” is essential to keeping our business competitive. It is this economic advantage that makes our efforts truly sustainable.”
