Count your carbon and stop googling!

A news report in today’s Australian revealed that conducting two google searches generates the same electricity as boiling a kettle

A news report in today’s Australian revealed that conducting two google searches generates the same electricity as boiling a kettle.

The claims were made after reviewing data supplied by Alex Wissner-Gross – a Harvard University physicist who has recently conducted research on the environmental impact of computing.

Wissner Gross suggest Google has a huge inpact on resources.
“Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power. A Google search has a definite environmental impact.”

With the number of internet searches each day topping the 200 million mark, environmentalists are concerned about the resulting greenhouse gas emissions. Industry analysts suggest that the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines – about 2 per cent of global CO2 emissions.

“Data centres are among the most energy-intensive facilities imaginable,” said Evan Mills, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

Banks of servers storing billions of web pages require power both to run and cool them.

Google has servers in the US, Europe, Japan and China.

“Google are very efficient but their primary concern is to make searches fast and that means they have a lot of extra capacity that burns energy,” commented Wissner Gross..

Source: news.com.au