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Will the global energy crisis crash the web?
By jonathan | May 13, 2008
A really good article on how energy expensive the web is. Green Data Centres and energy awareness has definitely gone mainstream.
So you’ve heard the hype on going green, wouldn’t you like to know how the internet fits into the big picture of saving energy? Every time you search Google you could power an 11-watt light bulb for an hour… Think that’s bad? Wait until you put that into perspective including sites like YouTube and every other bandwidth hog on the web…
So you now know one single Google search query consumes 2 to 8 watt-hours of energy. To put this on a scale, Google processes petabytes of information on a daily basis while indexing the web and doing other various things. If we average this out to 4.5 watt hours per query, and consider Google is easily handling 400 million queries a day based on comScore metrics, then we can see 1,800,000,000 (1.8 billion) watt-hours of energy being used daily just for basic search queries. The Google Complex itself uses the amount of power as 3,333 California homes.
Data Centers, Power Consumption, and Global Warming - Will the web crash?
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