I've criticized Google's waste of power in several of my blogs, and on my twitter account. Well, thanks to someone who posted a comment and a link on one of my pro ecosia articles I found out about Google's green movement.
Google began their green movement in 2007 when they co-founded the Climate Savers Computing Initiative to help make computers more energy effecient. Ecosia's video used to be hosted on youtube and said that one Google search was similar to turning on a regular light bulb. Well, now Ecosia has mysteriously changed their entire video and their video host as well. Why did they probably do this? Because Google owns youtube and they probably deleted their video and corrected their mistake.
Google claims that a single search using their search engine is one Killajoule or if I use this nifty converter that converts killajoules to watts*hours it is 0.277777778 WH per search.
This may surprise you but Google tries to roughly measure how much Co2 their search engine uses and than compare it to things that the everyday Joe uses. They claim that one morning newspaper is equivalent to 150 Google searches, and that the average American family uses the same amount of electricity per month that it takes to power 3,100,000 Google searches!
What really amazed me is that Google reuses everything, especially water. They are currently running two facilities that use 100 percent recycled water and they're goal is to have all of their data centers using 80 percent recycled water this year.
Why would money hungry Google care about going green?
Because they want to save money of course. You see, they save $30 a year per server than if they were to use the same amount of power as a regular server. Now I know $30 doesn't sound like a lot of money but when you take $30 plus 100,000 servers (well at least that was the rumored number two years ago) they're saving a big chunk of change!
I'm all about recycling but when I read how Google recycles their servers it made me a tad nervous.
They don't make it clear if they wipe all the information that they store on their servers before sending them out to be recycled. That's something I'd like them to come straight out and explain on their retired servers page or even better on the official Google blog.
