For the first time, Google (GOOG) has revealed its global electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, part of a concerted effort to become more transparent about its energy use as it opens new data centers, purchases additional buildings, hires more employees and encourages consumers to use its cloud-based services like Gmail.
The Mountain View-based Internet search giant revealed Thursday that the company consumed 2.26 billion kilowatt hours of electricity in 2010. In comparison, the U.S. Energy Information Administration says that the average U.S home uses about 11,000 kilowatt hours a year — which means Google’s electricity consumption is roughly equivalent to 200,000 homes.
Google has 29,000 employees worldwide, owns millions of square feet of office space around the world and is about to open its latest data center in Finland.
Google says it emitted 1.46 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2010 — equivalent to the yearly emissions of 70,000 Americans. Google purchases carbon offsets for its emissions and has been “carbon neutral” since 2007. It says 25 percent of its electricity came from renewable sources in 2010, a figure expected to rise to 30 percent in 2011 and 35 percent in 2012.
“For the last decade, energy use has been an obsession,” Urs Hoelzle, Google’s senior vice president for technical infrastructure, wrote in a blog post. “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.”
Tech companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere are under enormous pressure to reduce the environmental impact of their data centers and operations as more computing services — from email to video streaming — move to remote servers in “the cloud” and as consumers increasingly rely on mobile phones and tablets.
Google is believed to be the first major tech company to publicly reveal its electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.
“We applaud Google for fully disclosing the energy use and resultant carbon emissions from their operations,” said Noah Horowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “We hope their leadership results in similar disclosures on an ongoing basis from the other owners/operators of massive data centers like Microsoft, Amazon.com, IBM and the U.S. government.”
Earlier this week, Google announced that switching to Gmail for email can be about 80 times more energy-efficient than most in-house email, thanks to Google’s data centers.
It also said consumers can conserve energy by watching videos on YouTube, which Google owns, rather than on DVDs.
“You’d have to watch YouTube for three straight days for our servers to consume the amount of energy required to manufacture, package and ship a single DVD,” the company said in a blog post.
Calculating carbon emissions is a complex exercise that can be done in a variety of ways. Google looked at both direct and indirect emissions, including the emissions from company-owned vehicles like Street View cars and shuttle buses. It also calculated its purchased electricity, employee commuting habits, business travel, server manufacturing and data center construction.
Once Google gathered and crunched all the data, it was handed over to Cameron-Cole, a third-party verifier. “I was shocked at how hard the process is,” said Jolanka Nickerman, Google’s director of carbon offsets. “No one buys carbon dioxide — you don’t have receipts for it.”
Google’s emissions are growing because the company is continuing to grow as it launches new products and hires additional employees. The company tries to mitigate that with a three-pronged strategy of reducing energy consumption, investing in and using renewable energy and purchasing carbon offsets.
“I don’t know of any other company that’s done a full accounting,” said Jonathan Koomey, a consulting professor at Stanford who has published several studies on data centers and energy use. “This is clearly something Google has worked on for a long time.”
Horowitz of the NRDC stressed that while Google has calculated the energy used to deliver its various products, consumers also use energy when they conduct Internet searches or download videos. While companies are becoming more energy-efficient, consumers also need to step up efforts to reduce their energy consumption, he said.
“When you are shopping for a new computer, make sure it is an Energy Star-labeled product,” said Horowitz. “And make sure your computer goes into its low power sleep or standby mode when it’s not in use. “
Contact Dana Hull at 408-920-2706. Follow her at Twitter.com/danahull.
By the numbers
2.26 billion
Kilowatt hours of electricity Google consumed in 2010
200,000
Number of homes Google’s elecricity usage could power
1.46 million
Metric tons of carbon dioxide Google facilities emitted in 2010
70,000
Number of people it takes to emit an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide in a year
25
Percentage of electricity that Google says came from renewable sources in 2010
