.
I like Google.
Slowly, step by step, I have started to use more and more services from
Google. It started with searches, then continued with Gmail, Google
Earth and a number of other applications and services (including
Blogger, which was bought by Google in 2003 and which provides the
technical platform for this blog).
I
have found almost all the services I have tried useful (for myself or
at least for someone else), but it is now time to scrutinize Google
through the lenses of my
peak oil
glasses. Even if I primarily write about Google in the text that
follows, “Google” could mean any business competing with Google, or even
the entire Internet with all the services it provides to us in our
daily lives.
In the beginning of this year, the young Harvard physicist Alex Wissner-Gross claimed that
Google searches contribute significantly to CO2 emissions.
The angle that the newspaper chose was that two Google searches produce
the same amount of CO2 (carbon dioxide emissions) as boiling a kettle
of water for a cup of tea, and that Google searches thus have “
a definite environmental impact”.
More specifically, Wissner-Gross claimed that one Google search
generates around 7 grams of CO2 emissions. The carbon dioxide originates
from producing electricity to run your computer and to run Google’s
data centers. A few grams of CO2 may not sound like much if not for the
fact that the number of Google searches each day exceeds two hundred
million searches, and
may be closer to one billion according to some sources
Wissner-Gross
further claimed that the architecture of Google’s search engines was an
important factor as each Google search is distributed to several data
centers across the world that then compete against each other to find
and return the fastest answer. What you gain in speed thus comes at a
cost of higher energy consumption caused by all the extra computer
capacity (unused, misused or redundant) built into the larger system.
To no one's surprise, Google rejected this interpretation and stated that the company is ”
among the most efficient of all internet search providers”
because their data centers are relatively energy efficient compared to
"average" data centers. Google furthermore claimed that the number 7
grams CO2 per search is ”
many times too high”
and that the true numbers are 0,0003 kWh of energy and 0,2 grams of CO2
emissions per search. This small amount of energy is in parity with the
energy burned by the human body in 10 seconds, and the CO2 emissions
are thousands of times lower than the CO2 emissions caused by the
average car traveling only a few kilometers. Another powerful
formulation from Google is that “
In
the time it takes to do a Google search, your personal computer will
likely use more energy than we will use to answer your query”.
Another comparison is with the
numbers from this report (pdf) which claims that each
spam mail
ending up in your mail box on average generates 0,3 grams of CO2
emissions (the same amount as if you drive your car 1 meter). Since the
number of spam e-mails sent during 2008 was approximately 62 000 000 000
000 (62 trillions), the total amount of CO2 emissions caused by spam is
not insignificant and more precisely corresponds with the amount of CO2
emitted by a car driving around the world 1,6 million times. If we
assume that there are about 800 million cars on Earth, then all the spam
sent during 2008 corresponds to the accumulated CO2 emissions from all
the world’s cars driving 80 kilometers each. I am not sure whether this
is much or little in a big-picture perspective, but I have no problems
being judgmental and deeming spam e-mails 100% unnecessary, and now for
yet another reason. Where are the technological and social solutions to
stop them`
I saw a reference in January 2008 stating
that a "bizarre" record was broken one day in October the preceeding
year (2007). During that one day, more than 160 000 million spam e-mails
- roughly two dozen per man, woman and child on Earth - were sent.
Comparing this number with the total number of spam e-mails send during
2008 (see above), we find that the record from 2007 is actually lower
than the daily average of spam e-mails sent during 2008...
Other
experts who have made claims about the energy use of (Google) searches
state that CO2 emissions are between 1 and 10 grams (depending on
whether you have to turn on your computer first), or between 7 and 10
grams (if you use your computer for 15 minutes). The Times of London,
which published the original article (above), informed its readers a few
days later that the newspaper accepted Google's official claim that one
(simple) search (taking less than a second) produces only 0.2 grams of
CO2, and that the "search" refererred to in the article involved several
attempts over a teme period of several minutes.
In a clarification
by the physicist Wissner- Gross, he states that he never mentioned
Google specifically, that the example with the kettle of water was not
of his origin, and, between the lines, that the newspaper made a hen out
of a feather based on the interview with him.
Maybe the number 7 grams of CO2 emissions per search originally
came from this blog
(May 2007)? We should anyway probably take Google's numbers with a
pinch of salt since the company probably counts only the marginal cost
of performing one extra search, and not the nergy cost for temporarily
inactive servers, support and maintenance, and the distributet and thus
reduntand work being done in several data centers for each search. Also,
the idea that badly written
inefficient software code wastes electricity
and thus has a bigger ecological footpring than neat code is
thought-provoking (although I do not mean to imply that this is a
problem for Google).
The "news" about Google searches
and kettles of water quickly spread to several newspapers, but seem to
have been a storm in a teacup when viewed in the read mirror. So let us
step back and think about the larger issues that this text touches upon.
Using computers has an environmental impact. What we read and look at
when we use our computers is stored on many servers that are all
connected by computer networks. All of these parts require electricity (
personal computers the most, servers and data centers the least, and computer networks in-between).
The
electricity that we use for these purposes is generated mainly from
fossil fuels like coal and natural gas (85% of the energy consumed on
Earth is produced from fossil fuels). when Google states that each
search generates 0.2 gram of CO2 emissions, they surely count only the
energy costs for their enormous-but-highly-efficient data centers,
whereas the big energy thief is right in front of your nose - your own
computer at home or at work. The use of a personal computer may cause
CO2 emissions of somewhere between 40 and 80 grams of CO2 per hour, and
if you include this energy consumption it is easy to reach 7 gram of CO2
for an advanced search that constitutes of several steps.
As
I wrote in the beginning of this text, "Google" could in this context
represent something much bigger than the company itself and it is
somehow difficult to understand why exactly Google was singled out for
its energy consumption. In general, Google should be acknowledged for
their energy policies and for their lobbying in Washington for cleaner
energy sources. A few searches on the Internet (there we go again :-)
reveal several examples of interesting and good inititatives from
Google, like their report "
Clean energy 2030 and their work on
RE<C (
renewable energy less than coal),
where the goal is to produce renewable energy cheaper than electricity
generated by coal plants. According to Google, the company's data
centers use only
half as much energy as the average data centers.
The
global IT sector is responsible for 2% of the global CO2 emissions
(according to the firm Gartner Inc.). It may not sound much, but it is
as much as the global airline industry emits, and in contrast to an
airline industry in crisis, the IT sector is growing rapidly on a global
basis. Many actors consider numbers about energy use business secrets,
and for exampe Google does not want to tell how many or how big their
data centers are, or how many servers they own.
Google
clims that using their search engine on the larger whole saves money and
natural resources, since a Google search replaces more energy demanding
activities - we no longer have to use as many car trips, time, paper or
ink to have our questions answered. This is a valid argument, but it
assumes that we are doing more or less the same things (the same number
of searches) as before, but now in a more resource-efficient way. But we
obviously did not perform a hundred million searches per day before
Google and other search engines existed. Furthermore, we burn energy by
doing a lot of new things with our computers which could not be done easily - or at all - before:
We
may be obsessive about turning off the lights when we leave a room, but
at the same time we may happily spend hours clicking around online,
oblivious of the electricity lighting up our screen, heating our chip,
and powering ad cooling the data centers we're connected to. (It's true
that in some cases Internet use may substitute for other activities,
such as travel, that would consume more energy, but let's not kid
ourselves: the vast majority of computer and Internet use represents
additional energy consumption.) How many Twitterheads think about their
electricity use before they tweet? Not many. How many blogger think
about it before they blog? Not this one.
More
interesting than to examine Google in particular is to think about the
energy cost of computer use in general. Alex Wissner-Gross (again) has
calculated that each second of watching a web page generates 0.02 grams
of CO2 emissions. This applies to "static" website content - if you
watch animations or video, that number quickly becomes ten times higher.
The rule of thumb is of course that the more you use a computer, the
more energy you consume, and some activities (playing computer games,
watching movies) are more energy intensive than others (reading a
document, working with a word processor). Regarding the energy
consumption of avatars, I wrote the following almost one year ago:
It
is difficult to determine the benefit (or damage) of using virtual
worlds. On the one hand you use considerably less energy (and generate a
lot less in terms of CO2 emissions) if you cancel a trip and set up a
meeting in a virtual world. A computer on the other hand uses a lot of
electricity compared to non-electricity-consuming activites (go for a
walk, talk with a friend, help your children with their homework).
To
play World of Warcraft several hours a day can hardly be described as
an activity which "replaces traveling". It is more probable that playing
such a game for a long time increases the chance that you will make new
(faraway) friends whom you would later like to visit (sometimes by
hopping on an intercontinental flight). I am here walking on a minefield
of trying to differentiate between "good" and "bad" uses of computers
and the Internet. I prefer to avoid this particular discussion at this
particular point in time, but might return to the issue later. We can at
least for sure state that computers and galloping use of electricity
may be problematic in the long run - a characteristic shared by all
types of
exponential development: "
If not addressed, unlimited, ever-increasing compute performance will ultimately consume all the energy on the planet".
I
think it is definitely legitimate to critically investigate the energy
consumption and CO2 footprint of using for example YouTube, Twitter and
virtual worlds. Even without approaching the issue in a normative manner
(making claims about "good" or "bad" use), one may thus find clues as
to which activities could become painfully expensive if the electricity
and energy prices will rise and keep on rising in the future. According
to
a vice president at Sun Microsystems, it is totally clear that "
We
need more data centes, we need more servers. Each server burns more
watts than the previous generation and each watt costs more".
Something
to further take into account are proportions. A person who uses a
computer one hour per day (40 to 80 grams of CO2 emissions per day)
generates emissions somewhere in the range of 15 to 30 kilos per year. A
hardcore computer user who uses his/her computer 10 hours per day thus
generates something between 150 to 300 kilos of CO2 per year. Is this a
lot? Driving an average car 1000 km/620 miles (a single round trip
between Stockholm and Gothenburg) generates approximately 200 kilos of
CO2. This by no means absolves us from caring about the energy use of
computers, but it hints at the fact that the potential of reducing CO2
emissions in the computer/IT sector is - for now - limited compared to
the potential of reducing our energy use by changing our habits of
travelling.
