Google uses 260 million watts continuously across the globe, the company reported on 8th September 2011. It seems large but in comparison, its quite energy efficient.
Google owns about 3 percent of servers worldwide and uses only 1 percent of electricity for data centers worldwide. In its report, Google compares the energy usage of companies’ in-house computer systems to the energy used by its cloud servers. It estimates that running G-mail instead of an in-house e-mail system can be almost 80 times more energy efficient. Google says that 25 percent of its energy was supplied by renewable fuels—such as from wind farms—in 2011, and plans to increase that to 30 percent this year.
Urs Hoelzle, Senior Vice President, Technical Infrastructure in his post says” We started the process of getting to zero by making sure our operations use as little energy as possible. For the last decade, energy use has been an obsession. We’ve designed and built some of the most efficient servers and data centers in the world—using half the electricity of a typical data center. Our newest facility in Hamina, Finland, opening this weekend, uses a unique seawater cooling system that requires very little electricity.”
Google on its Green google site mention that “At Google, we’ve worked hard to minimize the environmental impact of our services. In fact, to provide you with Google products for a month, our servers use less energy per user than leaving a light on for 3 hours. If you add in our renewable energy and offsets, our footprint is zero. And we continue to find new ways to reduce our impact even further. Learn more about our efforts below. ”
Google efforts in efficiency, buying clean energy, and purchasing offsets brings googles carbon footprint down to zero. Google is going beyond carbon neutral by investing hundreds of millions of dollars in renewable energy projects that create far more renewable energy for the world than it consume as a company.
From goggle Official blog site: Google blog