Google Disputes Harvard Fellow's Pollution Estimate
The carbon footprint of a search query is nowhere near the estimate concluded by a Harvard academic, Google said late Sunday.
In October, Google revealed internal test results on power consumption in its data centers.
Google uses a metric called Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) to gauge its data center efficiency. PUE is a ratio of the total power consumed by a data center to the power consumed by all of the IT equipment used in the facility. A PUE of 2.0 shows that for every watt powering IT equipment, one watt is used to cool and distribute power to the equipment.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated in 2006 that typical data centers have a PUE of 2.0 or higher, but that figure would drop to 1.2 by 2011 due to new cooling techniques. Google said that its PUE average now is around 1.13.
That efficiency has been gained by using more efficient power supplies, efficient voltage regulators on motherboards and by designing server racks to use as little fan power as possible, Google said.
Estimates put the IT industry's greenhouse gas emissions around 2 percent of the world's total, about equivalent as the airline industry. But technology companies have come under increasing pressure from environmental organizations and consumers to become more conscious about emissions and other issues such as equipment disposal.
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