January 12, 2009
2 Google Searches Equals One Pot of Tea
How many kettles of water have you boiled today?
That might seem like random question for the Wired Campus, but it certainly conjures a picture of the energy used to bring water up to a whistling, scalding 212 degrees.
Now consider this: Alex Wissner-Gross, a physicist at Harvard University who researches the environmental impact of computing, says that two Google searches and bringing a kettle of water to boil generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide. About 200 million Google searches are performed every day. That’s a lot of tea.
The calculations were part of a story in The Sunday Times that looked at computing, energy consumption, and environmental impact. The story noted that Gartner had caluculated that the IT industry generated about as much greenhouse gas as the airline industry and that a Second Life avatar consumed about as much energy as the average Brazilian.
Unfortunately, much of the environmental impact of computing is hidden and distant. There’s no tailpipe sticking out of the back of your laptop. But campus IT professionals are starting to pay attention — not so much because of the carbon emissions generated by computers, but because of the growing cost of running them. —Scott Carlson
Posted on Monday January 12, 2009 | Permalink |Comments
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This prompts a “so what?” response from me. I can go online and get it done, or I can walk and drive around from library to library and end up with less information with a much greater investment of time and carbon resources. Since the need for information exists and will intensify, the implication to me is that we need greener energy sources to feed the computers – because the demand for information will not decrease, it will increase exponentially.
— ap Jan 12, 05:01 PM #
Google’s Jan. 11 response can be found here:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/powering-google-search.html
— kevin Jan 12, 07:56 PM #
Let’s pick on the coal industry first. This seems to me like empty research intended specifically to generate press.
— Joe Jan 13, 09:55 AM #
Get a grip – this is a tongue-in-cheek approach to alerting the community to a serious matter. IT does consume an inordinate amount of energy for little gain.
— Keir Hardie Jan 13, 10:51 AM #
I understand the research and communication part… but who needs Second Life? I think the post makes a lot of sense; we do need to be conservative with energy consumption.
— greeno Jan 13, 12:04 PM #
The airline industry runs directly on fossil fuel. The IT industry runs on electricity, some of which is generated without the use of fossil fuels. It is certainly worthwhile to reduce the amount of energy used by the IT industry, but if the greenhouse gas emission of the airline and IT industries are simply assumed to be the same, why are we trying to develop electric cars?
— richard Jan 13, 12:53 PM #
NOTE: The government runs scripts on 2nd life to find information on human behavior.
— Rob Jan 20, 12:59 PM #