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260 Megawatts!! Google's power usage at data center.

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The company said that its data centers continuously drew almost 260 million watts — about a quarter of the output of a nuclear power plant — to run Google searches, YouTube views, Gmail messaging and display ads on all those services around the world.
Though the electricity figure may seem large, the company asserts that the world is using less energy as a result of the billions of operations carried out in Google data centers. Google says people should consider things like the amount of gasoline saved when someone conducts a Google search rather than, say, driving to the library. “They look big in the small context,” Urs Hoelzle, Google’s senior vice president of technical infrastructure, said in an interview.
Google says that people conduct over a billion searches a day and numerous other downloads and queries, and it calculates that the average energy consumption for a typical user is small, about 180 watt-hours a month, or the equivalent of running a 60-watt light bulb for three hours. The overall electricity figure includes all Google operations worldwide, including the energy required to run its campuses and office parks, he added.



http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/t...ctricity-output-of-its-data-centers.html?_r=1
 
Texashiker said:
A year ago, I heard that every google search uses enough energy to boil a cup of water.

~~ EDIT ~~

An article from 2009 that says 2 google searches has the same carbon footprint as boiling a kettle of water (whatever a "kettle" is).

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5489134.ece
Click to expand...

That can't be true, at a billion searches per day google's usage would be 972 gigawatts. Based on napkin math of 1,000,000,000 searches per day each raising the temperature of 250ml water by 80 degrees celsius.
 
It sounds like a big number, but a lot gets done with that energy use. I wonder how much electricity everybody(combined) uses to keep beer cold.
 
That's not too much actually. A single wind turbine (the big industrial ones) produce a bit over 1MW, just to put it into perspective.
 
lord_emperor said:
That can't be true, at a billion searches per day google's usage would be 972 gigawatts. Based on napkin math of 1,000,000,000 searches per day each raising the temperature of 250ml water by 80 degrees celsius.
Click to expand...

The article estimates that in 2009, 200 million searches were being done daily.

Wikpedia says google serves 400 million queries per day
 
lxskllr said:
It sounds like a big number, but a lot gets done with that energy use. I wonder how much electricity everybody(combined) uses to keep beer cold.
Click to expand...

Haha yeah good one! 😉

260MW is chump change compared to how much all the computers folding/crunching out there are using combined. Or bitcoin mining for that matter.

It's funny to think that a large cruise ship could power more than half of Google. :biggrin:
 
This needs a Library of Congress reference in order for it to make sense. 260 megawatts is enough energy to run the Library of Congress for seven years.
 
Tsavo said:
This needs a Library of Congress reference in order for it to make sense. 260 megawatts is enough energy to run the Library of Congress for seven years.
Click to expand...
Watts is a unit of power, you want watt hours which is a unit of energy. 😛
 
Is that why there is no power to Southern California and SW Arizona right now? Because Google is sucking it all down?
 
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