If I had to pick the most preposterous part of this article, and I really hate to have to, it would probably be the end when people are decried as "polluters" because they use Twitter. Even if we forget marginal cost (which the article seems to do nicely), it is still absolutely asinine to poo-poo people for using "all that energy" to post tweets when they could "conserve" it.
If I stopped doing Google queries it would actually end wasting a lot more energy than it saves. I'd have to do things like drive to the library, buy books, call people on the phone to ask them questions, or just use some other sort of electronic medium to gain access to the information, which would likely require more energy since Google is quite energy-efficient when it comes to getting me close to relevant data. Likely all of these would result in more overall energy usage and whatever new scary environmental issue that causes this week.
Look, I am all about conservation of pretty much everything. I don't leave the water running when I brush my teeth and I turn the light off when I leave a room. I do this not because I feel like it helps the environment, but because there's just no sense in wasting energy or resources when I don't need to. Google, on the other hand, directly saves me an incalculable amount of energy and resources, not to mention time.
We're at a point where unsubstantiated worry about global warming causes people to do things under the guise of conservation which, when all the calculations are made, end up actually using more energy and consuming more resources than the thing they stopped doing.
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?
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.
How can there possibly be only 200m searches per day? I must use Google at least a hundred times daily, probably more. There's not even two million people like that already, in the whole Earth?
Google's searches rose 21.7 percent, for 64.1 percent market share, and Yahoo's searches dropped 1.4 percent from November 2007, for 16.1 percent share.
Total searches for the month exceeded 8 billion, up 9.6 percent from a year earlier.
[...]
Correction at 5:50 a.m. Monday: This story had an incorrect total for U.S. searches in November. The total was 12.3 billion.
[...]
Google grabbed a chunk of market share from rival search engines in the United States in November, new figures from ComScore show. [...] The total searches performed dropped 3 percent to 12.3 billion, though, so even Google lost out in absolute terms even as it gained share.
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Dividing by 30 days, that would be 410 million searches per day, in the U.S. For ~200 million internet users, that would be 2 searches per user per day.
Well, 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).
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.
If you currently use a heater for 1 hour/day at home, and then you turn it up to 2 hours/day, you do need about twice as much energy to power that heater as before.
However, if I make 100 additional requests today, Google doesn't need a new server. If everyone in the world makes 1% more requests, Google doesn't need a new server. So to try to calculate the cost of me doing one additional search is perhaps slightly misleading.
I'm not saying there is no cost. I'm just saying that the cost is incurred in chunks, and not "per request".
> "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). "
If I stopped doing Google queries it would actually end wasting a lot more energy than it saves. I'd have to do things like drive to the library, buy books, call people on the phone to ask them questions, or just use some other sort of electronic medium to gain access to the information, which would likely require more energy since Google is quite energy-efficient when it comes to getting me close to relevant data. Likely all of these would result in more overall energy usage and whatever new scary environmental issue that causes this week.
Look, I am all about conservation of pretty much everything. I don't leave the water running when I brush my teeth and I turn the light off when I leave a room. I do this not because I feel like it helps the environment, but because there's just no sense in wasting energy or resources when I don't need to. Google, on the other hand, directly saves me an incalculable amount of energy and resources, not to mention time.
We're at a point where unsubstantiated worry about global warming causes people to do things under the guise of conservation which, when all the calculations are made, end up actually using more energy and consuming more resources than the thing they stopped doing.