Efficient Computing
Introduction
Providing our users with fast, innovative products requires significant computing power. Data centers – which are large facilities containing lots of computers – account for most of Google’s energy needs. We take our energy use seriously and, from the very beginning, Google has focused on designing systems that use as little energy as possible. A decade later, we are operating what we believe to be the world's most efficient data centers.
How efficient is our infrastructure? Google-designed data centers use about half the energy of a typical data center. As a result, the energy used per Google search is very small; to be precise, we currently use about 1kJ (0.0003 kWh) of energy to answer the average query. This translates into roughly .2g of CO2 (for non-metric users, that's 0.007 ounces). Not only is energy use very small, web searches often take the place of more carbon- and time-intensive activities, such as driving a car to a library or spending hours navigating shopping malls.
To put these numbers into perspective, we've calculated the CO2 emissions of some everyday activities and compared them to "Google searches":
| Activity | Google searches |
|---|---|
| CO2 emissions of an average daily newspaper (100% recycled paper) | 850 |
| A glass of orange juice | 1,050 |
| One load of dishes in an EnergyStar dishwasher | 5,100 |
| A five mile trip in the average U.S. automobile | 10,000 |
| A cheeseburger | 15,000 |
| Electricity consumed by the average US household in one month | 3,100,000 |
In the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will likely use more energy than we will use to answer your query. (We care about that too, and in 2007 co-founded the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, a non-profit organization committed to making all computers more energy efficient.)
And our commitment to sustainability goes beyond just electricity and carbon. For example, two Google facilities currently run on 100% recycled water, and by 2010 we expect recycled water to provide 80% of our total data center water consumption. We also carefully manage the retirement of our servers to ensure that 100% of this material is either reused or recycled. Finally, we've begun to share our own data center best practices and are encouraging our industry peers to do the same. This broader impact could be significant; if all data centers operated at the same efficiency as ours, the U.S. alone would save enough electricity to power every household within the city limits of Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.
Sustainability is good for the environment, but it makes good business sense too. Most of our work is focused on saving resources such as electricity and water and, more often than not, we find that these actions lead to reduced operating costs. Being "green" is essential to keeping our business competitive. It is this economic advantage that makes our efforts truly sustainable.
Our five step plan
- Minimize electricity used by servers
- Reduce the energy used by the data center facilities themselves
- Conserve precious fresh water by using recycled water instead
- Reuse or recycle all electronic equipment that leaves our data centers
- Engage with our peers to advance smarter energy practices
These steps are just a starting point, and we're not done yet. We're committed to being carbon neutral as a company, and we're always looking for ways to make the services we provide more sustainable. To help us achieve this vision we need passionate, innovative engineers who are motivated to push the boundaries of efficient computing design. Join us and help make organizing the world's information greener.