What is google’s electricity consumption?
On 09/08/2001 Google disclosed it’s energy consumption details. According to Google, it continuously uses enough electricity to power 200,000 homes.
Every time you do a Google search, watch YouTube or use other products like Gmail, Google data centers around the world use electricity. Those data centers continuously use almost 260 million watts. Keep in mind, next time when you hit Google search button, it’s not for free.
Here are some pretty interesting key statistics shared by them,
- Google continuously uses enough electricity to power 200,000 homes
- Google data centers around the world continuously draw almost 260 million watts
- Google consumed over 2 billion kilowatt hours of energy in 2010
- For a month Google servers use less energy per user than leaving a light on for 3 hours
- Google data centers use only 50% of the energy of most other data centers through their efficiency and efforts
- Google uses very little of the world’s electricity (less than 0.01%)
- An average search uses 0.3 watt-hours of electricity. This translates into roughly 0.2g of carbon dioxide.
- Multiply: 0.3 watt-hours per search with Google’s 1 billion searches a day: Result – Google search uses about 12.5 million watts of Google’s 260 million watts total electricity consumption by data centers
Energy saving Google: Renewable energy initiatives,
- Google has invested $800 million in solar and wind power sources
- Google plans to source 35 % of its energy use from clean power next year
- Google’s Renewable energy projects represent a total capacity of over 1.7 GW
- Google on-campus green initiatives cut the equivalent of more than 10,000 metric tons of CO2 per year
- Powered by renewables: 1.6 MW of solar panels produce 3 million kWh of clean energy every year at Google Mountain View campus
- Greening buildings : 4.5 million sq. ft. of building space set to achieve LEED green certification status
- Google says that if you add in their renewable energy and offsets, Google’s footprint is zero
Google searches per day ?
- Google says that people conduct over a billion searches every day. Provide mobile mapping for over 200 million smartphone users, and host over 4 million businesses in the cloud.
The next time when you hit Google search button, Keep in mind it’s not for free.
Visit Google Energy Consumption big picture page for more information