Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches
technology.timesonline.co.uk
Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches
1–10 of 16 posts
Re: Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches
#2snap. how long do i have to run my macbook for (say 50% cpu) to boil a pot of tea?
Re: Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches
#3not so surprising, but an interesting comparison:
> "A recent report by Gartner, the industry analysts, said the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines - about 2% of global CO2 emissions."
also, to answer my other question:
> opportunity cost is an interesting point. kind of connects with the 'living in space' submission, not that space can support the life we can't support on earth.
> "Wissner-Gross has also calculated the CO2 emissions caused by individual use of the internet. His research indicates that viewing a simple web page generates about 0.02g of CO2 per second. This rises tenfold to about 0.2g of CO2 a second when viewing a website with complex images, animations or videos.
> "A separate estimate from John Buckley, managing director of carbonfootprint.com, a British environmental consultancy, puts the CO2 emissions of a Google search at between 1g and 10g, depending on whether you have to start your PC or not. Simply running a PC generates between 40g and 80g per hour, he says. of CO2 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). "
Re: Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches
#4Yah right,
Say you are boiling .5 liter of water, or 500 grams of water. It takes 1 calorie to raise 1g of water 1 degree. So 20 degrees to 100 * 500 g = 40,000 calories = .05 kW/h * 14c per kW/h = .7 cents.
Can it really cost google .7 cents to do a search? I don't see how that can possibly be. I can't find hard data on how many searches are done on google, but it's about 1 to 2 billion per day. 1.5 billion * .7 cents = $1 billion per DAY - there is simply no way google is spending $300 billion for energy.
Even if you assume they are paying a lot less per kW/H it still makes no sense.
And if he is including the cost of my computer in his numbers (as he seems to imply, but doesn't say), then that's simply dishonest.
Edit: OOPS! Big messup on the final bit of math :( OK, I guess it's a lot more reasonable now. It's ~$3 billion per year, not 300. That's still a lot, but at least possible.
Any chance any of their financials with the SEC could shed light on how much they pay for energy?
Re: Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches
#5Well, the marginal environmental cost of me doing another Google search is pretty close to zero -- those servers are already running anyway.
How many requests/sec per server do you think Google handles? Then we can try to guess how many additional queries we would need to make for them to buy an additional server (causing higher power consumption).
Re: Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches
#6Yah right, Say you are boiling .5 liter of water, or 500 grams of water. It takes 1 calorie to raise 1g of water 1 degree. So 20 degrees to 100 * 500 g = 40,000 calories = .05 kW/h * 14c per kW/h = .7 cents. Can it really cost google .7 cents to do a search? I don't see how that can possibly be. I can't find hard data on how many searches are done on google, but it's about 1 to 2 billion per day. 1.5 billion * .7 cen…
[deleted]
Re: Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches
#7Yah right, Say you are boiling .5 liter of water, or 500 grams of water. It takes 1 calorie to raise 1g of water 1 degree. So 20 degrees to 100 * 500 g = 40,000 calories = .05 kW/h * 14c per kW/h = .7 cents. Can it really cost google .7 cents to do a search? I don't see how that can possibly be. I can't find hard data on how many searches are done on google, but it's about 1 to 2 billion per day. 1.5 billion * .7 cen…
I can't find hard data on how many searches are done on google
It's hinted in the article.
with more than 200m internet searches estimated globally daily
Google has an 81% market share. Let's call it 170 million searches per day. 49 grams of CO2 are released per kWh. http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?q=Alex+Wissner-Gross... The article said that Google releases 7 grams per search, so that would be 1/7th of a kWh ~= 0.14 kWh.
Multiplying that by 170m searches/day = 24m kWh/day. At $0.10/kWh, that would be $2.4 million/day, or $886 million/year.
You figured $1 billion/day, but, besides using different assumptions, you incorrectly calculated 1.5 billion searches/day * .7 cents/search/day. It actually equals only $10.5 million/day.
[EDIT] walterk beat me by a minute to that final math correction.
Re: Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches
#8Yah right, Say you are boiling .5 liter of water, or 500 grams of water. It takes 1 calorie to raise 1g of water 1 degree. So 20 degrees to 100 * 500 g = 40,000 calories = .05 kW/h * 14c per kW/h = .7 cents. Can it really cost google .7 cents to do a search? I don't see how that can possibly be. I can't find hard data on how many searches are done on google, but it's about 1 to 2 billion per day. 1.5 billion * .7 cen…
Your math is a bit off.
1.5 billion * .7 cents = 1 billion cents not 1 billion dollars.
Re: Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches
#9Well, the marginal environmental cost of me doing another Google search is pretty close to zero -- those servers are already running anyway. How many requests/sec per server do you think Google handles? Then we can try to guess how many additional queries we would need to make for them to buy an additional server (causing higher power consumption).
>those servers are already running anyway.
The power plants are on anyway, I might as well leave my heat on and windows open.
Re: Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches
#10Well, the marginal environmental cost of me doing another Google search is pretty close to zero -- those servers are already running anyway. How many requests/sec per server do you think Google handles? Then we can try to guess how many additional queries we would need to make for them to buy an additional server (causing higher power consumption).
>those servers are already running anyway. The power plants are on anyway, I might as well leave my heat on and windows open.
Not the same thing.
The energy consumed by your home scales (roughly) linearly with usage. The energy consumed by a computer does not scale linearly with the number of http requests -- most of the energy is just to keep the machine up & running, with a minimal additional cost per request.