Google’s Carbon Cost

A Harvard academic says that two Google searches typically use as much CO2 as boiling an electric kettle.

Harvard physicist Alex Wissner-Gross thinks computers could be greener. He’s been researching how much energy they use, and his results are, well, a little surprising. He’s found that undertaking two Google searches produces 14 grams of CO2, about the same amount produced by boiling an electric kettle.

He says the carbon emissions come not only from the computer itself, but from the data centers that produce the information for that search, several data banks at once, he claims.

However, Google is arguing the point. It claims that the average search brings a result in under 0.2 seconds, with the search itself using its servers for a few thousandths of a second, amounting to 0.0003 kWh of energy per search, or 0.2g of CO2.

Wissner-Gross, who is prepping a site called co2stats.com to help companies find the "energy inefficient" areas of their sites, told the BBC:

"Google isn’t any worse than any other data center operator. If you want to supply really great and fast result, then that’s going to take extra energy to do so."

In its official blog, Google responded to the accusations:

"We’ve made great strides to reduce the energy used by our data centers, but we still want clean and affordable sources of electricity for the power that we do use."

"In 2007, we co-founded the Climate Savers Computing Initiative. This non-profit consortium is committed to cutting the energy consumed by computers in half by 2010 and so reducing global CO2 emissions by 54 million tons per year. That’s a lot of kettles."