{"id":1324,"date":"2011-09-09T15:34:36","date_gmt":"2011-09-09T13:34:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ofcourseimright.com\/?p=1324"},"modified":"2011-09-09T15:34:36","modified_gmt":"2011-09-09T13:34:36","slug":"is-google-green-or-wasteful","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/?p=1324","title":{"rendered":"Is Google Green or Wasteful?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"GoogleToday’s New York Times<\/a> has an interesting article<\/a> about how Google uses enough electricity on its own to power 200,000 American homes.\u00a0 Google claims that it’s using that energy so that consumers don’t have to, and that in fact they do so more efficiently than consumers in aggregate would.\u00a0 There’s some small merit to the argument they’re making, but it isn’t obvious at first glance.<\/p>\n

Google’s argument is that they’re saving you a trip to the library when you do a search.\u00a0 That might be true sometimes, of course, but the chances are you didn’t go anyway.\u00a0 For one, you might have instead picked up your local yellow pages, or an Atlas, or written a postcard.\u00a0 But yes, sometimes you might have gone to the library\u2013 with your car.<\/p>\n

Often times we the consumers get tricked into thinking that all big numbers are meaningful.\u00a0 Let me give you an example from the networking industry.\u00a0 It is not unheard of for a high power Internet router to suck a lot of power.\u00a0 A fully configured Cisco CRS-1 <\/a>uses about 8Kw of power.\u00a0 These are big pieces of hardware that can each serve the needs of thousands of customers.\u00a0 Perhaps there are 2,000 of them and their ilk in America, and probably less.\u00a0 And so at any moment that’s about 16 megawatts worth of power.\u00a0 Big number, right?\u00a0 And so let’s say that we found a way to cut their power consumption by 10%.\u00a0 Per box, that’s 800 watts.\u00a0 That’s a lot of power, right?<\/p>\n

Now let’s look at a consumer router.\u00a0 You know the ones- Linksys<\/a>, D-Link, etc.\u00a0 They use about 8 watts of power.\u00a0 Of course there are about 89 million of those devices out there[1]<\/a>[2]<\/a>.\u00a0 That means that savings of a single watt of power in those devices saves 89 megawatts.<\/p>\n

Why do I mention all of this?\u00a0 Who cares about how much power Google consumes?!<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0 The real issue is the computer you’re reading this post with.\u00a0 There are orders of magnitude more of those than there are of the computers that Google uses to return a search result or your email.<\/p>\n

But what do you get for that energy usage?\u00a0 Well, you don’t have to have your bills sent to you in paper copy, and you don’t have to use the ink to write a check, and you don’t have to have as many checks printed, and you don’t need to receive paper copies of the TV guide, and you might not even use DVDs any more if you’re using NetFlix<\/a>.\u00a0 In fact, you probably didn’t read the New York Times article on printed paper!\u00a0 You don’t need to fax, because you can email, and you probably don’t even know<\/em> how good your handwriting is, these days, because you’ve been typing.<\/p>\n

This is not to say that the technology sector shouldn’t do a better job at recycling or energy use.\u00a0 And it’s good that we look at the total cost of what we consume.\u00a0 But let’s also recognize the benefits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today’s New York Times has an interesting article about how Google uses enough electricity on its own to power 200,000 American homes.\u00a0 Google claims that it’s using that energy so that consumers don’t have to, and that in fact they do so more efficiently than consumers in aggregate would.\u00a0 There’s some small merit to the … Continue reading “Is Google Green or Wasteful?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":172,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-internet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/172"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1324"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1325,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1324\/revisions\/1325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}