Google Fires Back At Energy Usage Claims From Harvard Physicist

Boston (dbTechno) – Google has fired back at claims by a Harvard University physicist that their search engine uses a very high amount of energy.

Harvard University physicist Alex Wissner-Gross has come out and stated that a Google search produces a great deal of energy.

According to his claims, by doing two searches on the Google search engine, you are creating enough CO2 and using enough energy that you should be able to boil a kettle.

Google has fired back though by posting on the Official Google Blog.

According to the post by the Senior Vice President of Operations at Google, Urs Holze, “In terms of greenhouse gases, one Google search is equivalent to about 0.2 grams of CO2. The current EU standard for tailpipe emissions calls for 140 grams of CO2 per kilometer driven, but most cars don’t reach that level yet. Thus, the average car driven for one kilometer (0.6 miles for those of in the U.S.) produces as many greenhouse gases as a thousand Google searches.”

Holze claims that Google has made “great strides to reduce the energy used by our data centers, but we still want clean and affordable sources of electricity for the power that we do use.”

It has been known for quite some time that the IT industry uses a great deal of energy, but it is also known that they are working to become more efficient and have succeeded a great deal.

Holze refers to the 2007 Climate Savers Computing Initiative, which Google co-founded.

He stated that the group aims for more efficient computing.

“This non-profit consortium is committed to cutting the energy consumed by computers in half by 2010 — reducing global CO2 emissions by 54 million tons per year. That’s a lot of kettles of tea.”

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