Basically, it’s a ridiculous amount of energy, enough to power a city of 100,000 to 200,000 people. For comparison, Salt Lake City, Utah ‘only’ has 186,440 people. Google reasons that it’s okayish to be using that much power because people are actually saving energy by using Google (searching instead of using the library, let’s say). The average Google user’s energy usage is similar to running a 60-watt lightbulb for 3 hours. Not bad for all the cat videos we watch. [NY Times]
Gordon A. Freeman
Friday, September 9, 2011 at 7:49 AMIs that more or less than 1.21 jiggawatts
Shannon
Friday, September 9, 2011 at 8:03 AMit’s less, and it’s Giga watts, Americans just say it funny
1 million = 1 mega, 1000 mega = 1 giga
olearymo
Friday, September 9, 2011 at 8:43 AMIt’s not Americans, just Emmett Brown.
Maverick
Friday, September 9, 2011 at 8:23 AMThat still isn’t that bad when you think about how many people are using google at any given time.
Bakefook
Friday, September 9, 2011 at 12:52 PMIn the big scheme of things, this is a relatively small per-user consumption… considering that every single milliwatt of power and byte of bandwidth used by Facebook a step towards the vacuous entropy of the human race.
[Like this]
Dan
Friday, September 9, 2011 at 3:45 PMYes but does Salt lake city provide me with a service I use multiple times a day, no? I didn’t think so.
Patrick
Friday, September 9, 2011 at 11:55 PM25% of the power comes from renewable energy, some of which Google owns the infrastructure for.
The 3 60-watt bulbs figure is average google user consumption per month.
I also bet Microsoft and Yahoo will stay very quiet on their power consumption, as even though they do less frequent indexing of sites, I bet they (and this is a completely baseless guess) have an order of magnitude larger amount of power consumption per search. I say this because Google sees its cost/search as a key strategic advantage.
Steve Muenstermann
Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 10:57 AMIn the big scheme of things Google is the responsible example of a eco-friendly datacenter cloud infrastructure. Considering they receive over 2 billion searches per day they are a critical part of global B2B communication. Their PUE’s are far below 99.9% of the existing data center cloud networks and should be revered for their active responsibility to utilize as much natural harvested energy as possible.