Google has its fingers in a lot of different pies: search, advertising, video streaming, cloud storage, and now… social networking. To keep it all online and instantly accessible requires a whole lot of servers – 900,000 of them to be precise. Stanford professor Jonathan Koomey has estimated that Google’s server farm accounts for 0.01% of the world’s electricity use. If that sounds like a lot (and it is) then it is best to put the figures into perspective. Based on Koomey’s figures, data centers account for 1.5% of the world’s electricity consumption. Google, being the biggest data center could be expected to account for a lot more of that electrical requirement. How do they do it? Google aims for “higher infrastructure efficiency” at their facilities – in an attempt to have its servers provide as much bang per watt as is possible. They also are making efforts to use alternative sources of energy wherever possible via solar, wind and tidal generation systems. Google Gobbles 0.01% of the World’s Electricity
Google has its fingers in a lot of different pies: search, advertising, video streaming, cloud storage, and now… social networking. To keep it all online and instantly accessible requires a whole lot of servers – 900,000 of them to be precise. Stanford professor Jonathan Koomey has estimated that Google’s server farm accounts for 0.01% of the world’s electricity use. If that sounds like a lot (and it is) then it is best to put the figures into perspective. Based on Koomey’s figures, data centers account for 1.5% of the world’s electricity consumption. Google, being the biggest data center could be expected to account for a lot more of that electrical requirement. How do they do it? Google aims for “higher infrastructure efficiency” at their facilities – in an attempt to have its servers provide as much bang per watt as is possible. They also are making efforts to use alternative sources of energy wherever possible via solar, wind and tidal generation systems. 
