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Google: We're Friendlier For The Environment Than Cheeseburgers, Orange Juice

Posted 05/18/09 at 04:36:08 PM  by Andy Salisbury

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Google recognizes that there’s been a lot of talk about the energy needed to power the Internet, and they’ve decided to publicly throw in their two cents by boldly stating that the carbon emissions required to get a glass of orange juice is equivalent to 1,050 Google searches.

“Our engineers crunched the numbers and found that an average query uses about 1 kJ of energy and emits about 0.2 grams of carbon dioxide,” wrote Urs Hölze, Google’s Senior Vice President of Operations. “We have a team of dedicated engineers focused on designing and building the most efficient data centers in the world. In fact, through efficiency innovations, we have managed to cut energy usage in our data centers by over 50 percent, so we're using less than half the energy to run our data centers as the industry average. This efficiency means that in the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will likely use more energy than we will use to answer your query.”

The blog post also noted that to do one load of dishes in an EnergyStar compliant dishwasher was equivalent to 5,100 searches, a give mile trip in the average U.S. automobile was 10,000 searches, a cheeseburger would run you 15,000 searches and just one month’s worth of electricity used by the average U.S. household clocks in with 3,100,000 searches. Sure makes you think, doesn’t it?

 

Image Credit: Chip Litherland for The New York Times

COMMENTS:3
TAGS: Google, environment, energy, Efficiency
COMMENTS
avatar“Our engineers crunched

Submitted by Vegan on Mon, 05/18/2009 - 9:30pm

“Our engineers crunched the numbers and found that an average query
uses about 1 kJ of energy and emits about 0.2 grams of carbon dioxide,”

 

Truly, we live in a crazy world, that we can waste our time finding out things like this.

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avatarYes, truly crazy world.

Submitted by AntiHero on Tue, 05/19/2009 - 11:09am

Yes, truly crazy world.

Imagine thinking like this all the time:

So for me to enjoy this delicious fast food meal i am enjoying now, it would be like  1,000,000 searches (burger, fries, and a coke) taking into account the energy spent making the cup, the fry container, the wrapper for the burger, the bag for it all, the tray for the drink, the straw, the drink itself, the energy spent raising the cow, killing it, butchering it, processing it into ground sirloin, forming it into a patty, cooking, and also taking into account transporting it, and storing it, then the fries, which would be farming, transporting, storing of potatoes and salt, and the drink, syrup creation, transfer, storage, along with water from tap, cooled, and then ice made from tap water, and a co2 canister to carbonate the drink....in the time i wrote this, honestly, i stopped caring how much energy i spent doing so, considering my pc and laptop both running on my desk with 2 monitors, a router, speakers, usb hub and ip phone and headset for the phone, also finished eating said meal.

The useless time spent is hilarious. Forget about energy spent, just use efficient means, and instead of wasting energy, use it efficiently (not as i've done here) by not leaving high power consuming products running needlessly, or stop making it a big deal...your choice.

I don't like Microsoft, I associate with it.

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avatarDuh~

Submitted by johnny3144 on Mon, 05/18/2009 - 8:04pm

it was quite obiouse the energy cost of a google search was relatively insignificant... people still drive their automobile 30 miles a day just to work or pick up milk, i don't see anybody actually quit driving(appearently you gotta do what you gotta do).

 

Orange juice: grow orange, transport orange to plant(truck), process orange, transport orange juice to store(train, truck, ship), store orange juice in store(in fridge), you drive to store,  pick up orange juice(store lightning, heating, cooling, cleaning), drive home, store orange juice(fridge). that's a lot of carbon and energy!

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