The Environmental Impact of Google Searches 516
paleshadows writes "The Times Online reports that researchers claim that each query submitted to Google has a quantifiable impact. Specifically, two queries performed through a desktop computer generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a cup of tea. From the article: 'While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 [whereas] boiling a kettle generates about 15g [...] Google is secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint. It also refuses to divulge the locations of its data centers. However, with more than 200m Internet searches estimated daily, the electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by computers and the Internet is provoking concern. A recent report [argues that] the global IT industry generate[s] as much greenhouse gas as the world's airlines — about 2% of global CO2 emissions.'" Google makes an interesting focus for such claims, but similar extrapolations have been done before about, for instance, the energy costs of sending a short email.
Re:Wrong Comparison (Score:4, Informative)
Given that their electricity costs directly hit their cost of doing business, I suspect they agree with this goal.
Google locates a lot of datacenter capacity in areas served by hydroelectric power.
Re:Wrong Comparison (Score:5, Informative)
It would be better if you rode the bus to the library. But that would be inconvenient. It says a lot about the issue that everybody (except all the kneejerk "skeptics" that will soon post on this story) cares about curbing greenhouse gases, but nobody is willing to make the troublesome lifestyle changes necessary to make a real difference.
My city doesn't have bus service. So yes, waiting for a bus would be incredibly inconvenient.
nobody is willing to make the troublesome lifestyle changes necessary to make a real difference.
Does this include you? People aren't going to make huge changes because, for the most part, that doesn't make a big difference. Everyone making a small change has a much, much bigger impact than just a few people (those unselfish enough to care) making a big change. Raising the minimum legal mileage for new cars by one MPG would be a much, much bigger change than me riding a bike to work every day. (Not that I could given the distance, nor could both me and my wife given how far apart we work no matter where we move.) I can choose to not buy another car until one that gets high mileage from an alternative fuel source is available, which is what I've been doing for the last few years.
I personally boil my tea and coffee water in the microwave.
I drink tap water at whatever temperature it comes out of the cold faucet. That reduces my carbon footprint further. =p
Re:Actual Impact? (Score:2, Informative)
This may be excessively cynical, but I regularly get these studies quoted at me and have come to believe that, whilst there is clearly sanity in reducing energy usage as far as possible without impairing needed performance, there is also a couple of other motivations driving much of this stuff. One is the fact that, like it or not, this sort of thing attracts funding, and another is the overwhelming urge to demonstrate that you're a nice PC green believer in saving the planet.
The problem is, as you say, that many of these studies generate numbers that are of little relevance to the real world and are designed more to produce publicity and hence help push relatively meaningless initiatives than to highlight any real potential for improvement. Now I'm off to boil the kettle -- and if they don't like it, they can build and sell a more efficient means of heating water.
Re:I don't buy it... (Score:4, Informative)
Google claims to use less energy than the user during the search:
http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/datacenters/
"The graph below shows that our Google-designed data centers use considerably less energy - both for the servers and the facility itself - than a typical data center. As a result, the energy used per Google search is minimal. In fact, in the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will use more energy than we will use to answer your query."
The researcher claims that surfing produces 0.02g of CO2 per second.
Re:Wrong Comparison (Score:3, Informative)
Carbon Footprint calculations are rather complicated. For any of you have worked on manufacturing systems it is much like a highly detailed BOM (Bill of Materials) that has calculations down to the finest details. And because the there are so many variables using your intuition or estimates undoubtedly makes your values way off.
For example if you buy lumber from local sources may have a higher carbon footprint then lumber that you buy overseas. Yes there is a carbon cost of shipping the lumber across the ocean, however they may have better process of logging and replacing trees that they cut down in the other country, also they may be logging right next to the barge, or rail line, Vs. having to ship smaller quantities cross your state.
Re:I don't buy it... (Score:4, Informative)
Chris Goodall, author of Ten Technologies to Save the Planet, estimates the carbon emissions of a Google search at 7g to 10g (assuming 15 minutes' computer use).
So they might be measuring the energy needed to turn on a computer and mess around on the Internet for 15 minutes. Or they might just be making stuff up.
Your PC uses more energy waiting for a response (Score:5, Informative)
From http://www.google.com/corporate/datacenters/ [google.com]
Re:Wrong Comparison (Score:5, Informative)
I do know that actually. But transmission and distribution losses in the USA are estimated at 7.2% [climatetechnology.gov]. If the longest feasable power line is 4000 miles long, and google is putting their data centers 4 miles from hydro electric plants, they're saving 7.2% more energy than other data centers on average (margin of error 0.001%).
Transmission losses are one of the biggest arguments in heating the home with gas vs. electric, since with gas you're getting 100% of the avalible heat from the fuel, as opposed to electric where at most 90% of the heat is converted into electricity at the plant, you lose another 7% in transmission and then another 1-2% in the heater itself = 18-19% energy loss from a coal or natural gas power plant vs. heating with gas in the home.
Re:Wrong Comparison (Score:3, Informative)
Transmission losses are one of the biggest arguments in heating the home with gas vs. electric, since with gas you're getting 100% of the avalible heat from the fuel, as opposed to electric where at most 90% of the heat is converted into electricity at the plant, you lose another 7% in transmission and then another 1-2% in the heater itself = 18-19% energy loss from a coal or natural gas power plant vs. heating with gas in the home.
You've got the right idea but your numbers are way off.
A modern large CCGT plant might push 60% efficiency. With transmission losses energy loss is close to 50%.
Numbers don't seem to add up (Score:5, Informative)
Some facts as I understand them snarfed from the web - corrections welcomed...
rough cost of (wholesale) energy per kilowatt hour (kwh): ~5c
CO2 cost per kwh: ~1kg (coal power: http://cdiac.ornl.gov/pns/faq.html [ornl.gov])
time for my (small) 1 litre (~ 1kw) kettle to boil when full is ~ 5 minutes which compares well with the theoretical energy for a 1litre at ~350kj, or 350 seconds time for 1kw . Hence power for a small boiled kettle is a killowatt for 1/10 of an hour, or 0.1 kwh
So I get... ... the article says a kettle take 15g, which I don't get even close to; maybe clever people boil just enough to make single cups only?
Kettle boiling: costs ~.5c, and ~ 100g,
If the article was true, Google doing "more than 200m" searches a day would spend ~ $20m a day on power, or ~ $7billion a year, consuming 100,000 megawatt hours, or a continuous drain of 4,000 megawatts (about the power output of a small US state). On the authors figures, total power consumption would be ~ 650 megawatts, which is still pretty huge, and would still be spending ~ $1billion a year.
Google use cheap, mass produced low power units in gigantic numbers - estimates are hard to come by, I will estimate 200,000 based on inflating some public estimates (e.g. http://arnab.org/blog/how-many-computers-does-google-have [arnab.org]).
Energy cost of networking is significant, but I do not believe as great as machines; I'll add 50% for good luck. Utility server machines are dropping in power (~100-200w) but also require cooling, UPSs and network etc., so let's call it 500w all up (figures are difficult to get; everyone is selling something power center wise) - so I get 100 megawatts; or 1/6th of the author's estimate, or 1/40th of the true kettle figure.
I'd say that the author is overstating the case to make a political point - if I was cynical I'd point out the author has also just launched a business to 'green your web site' by installing monitoring software, estimating the energy cost of searches to it, and then buying carbon offsets on your behalf, so it is in his interests to overestimate such usage..
Re:Oh brother (Score:3, Informative)
What are the odds the US Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is federally funded?
The IEEE is an international non-profit, professional organization for the advancement of technology (including standardizing Ethernet and WiFi, publishing leading electrical engineering research publications, etc.). It has the most members of any technical professional organization in the world, with more than 365,000 members in around 150 countries.
You can read about their sources of income [ieee.org] here. Most money comes from conference fees, individual memberships, and journal subscriptions. I don't think they get very much money directly from any government.
Did the Author read this? (Score:5, Informative)
Did the author read Google's on pages on energy usage?
http://www.google.com/corporate/green/energy/reducing.html [google.com]
http://www.google.com/corporate/datacenters/index.html [google.com]
Re:Mod Up (Score:3, Informative)
That changes environments, it does not destroy them. How is a school of salmon worth more than a school of trout, or a deer worth more than a bass? Are trees more valuable than algae too (well, yes lumber, but then a reservoir shelters from drought). How is hunting and hiking inherently better than boating and fishing? It is of course destructive for anyone who had property, or lived where there's now water, but beyond that it is merely change (excepting endangered species/migratory path situations). The change can be damaging if uncontrolled of course but we are (usually) able to control changed much easier with a dam then by spewing waste products into the air. A few of our natural and artificial lakes are quite toxic thanks to mercury poisoning at this point.
Re:Wrong Comparison (Score:3, Informative)
You're a moron for excluding nuclear energy.
And you are a moron if you think that nuclear waste [sea-us.org.au] isn't a huge ecological disaster.
Burying tons and tons (about 30 tons per nuclear power plant, per year) of Uranium 238 which has a half life in the thousands of years is not a good "green" solution just because people want to have nice cool houses in the middle of summer and positively toasty ones in the winter.
Still not convinced? Here is an article from Business Net about what we are (not) going to do with all this radioactive waste [bnet.com].
I agree with you face-palming yourself, but it's not for the same reasons that you have. Honestly, if my backyard and my children's backyards weren't polluted by other people's mess, I wouldn't say a word. Sadly we all have to sleep in the bed you make though.
Re:To "Anonymous Coward" (Score:3, Informative)
Further, it completely ignores the inverse correlation of warming with sunspot activity, which is a much stronger correlation than greenhouse gases could ever pretend to be...Don't believe my statement about sunspots? Then look it up. I did.
Okay, I did. I pulled the raw data from the Climatic Research Unit is the UK, the Solar Influences Data Analysis Center in Belgium, and CO2 data from Mauna Loa and ice core data. If you plot them you get this [wikipedia.org]. Once we smooth out the high frequency signal so we can actually look at the major trends we see you don't really have much of a point at all. Okay, maybe I'm looking at the wrong time scales. Let's pull 10000 years worth of reconstructed proxy data on sunspots and temperature directly from the NOAA. The result is this [wikipedia.org]. Yup, there's some (imperfect) historical correlation (as one might expect since the sun is clearly going to have some effect on climate). But back to the first plot -- there we have no solar correlation to the recent warming... so what exactly are you talking about?