

 Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches - nickb
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5489134.ece

======
tdavis
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.

------
ars
Yah right,

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?

~~~
gravitycop
_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...](http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?q=Alex+Wissner-Gross+kwh)
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.

~~~
Eliezer
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?

~~~
gravitycop
Here's more data. I think this is just for the U.S.:

<http://news.cnet.com/8300-1023_3-93.html>

 _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._

-

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.

------
aneesh
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).

~~~
DTrejo
>those servers are already running anyway.

The power plants are on anyway, I might as well leave my heat on and windows
open.

~~~
aneesh
Not the same thing.

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.

~~~
puzzle-out
But more searches requires more servers in the first place.

~~~
aneesh
Yes, but it's not linear. It looks more like a "step function."
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Step_function>)

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".

------
diN0bot
not so surprising, but an interesting comparison:

> "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). "

------
diN0bot
snap. how long do i have to run my macbook for (say 50% cpu) to boil a pot of
tea?

------
gravitycop
Discussion of Google's response, here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=430272>

