Google is not power hungry, report finds

INTERNET SEARCH GIANT Google might appear to be power hungry, but it only accounts for one per cent of electricity used by data centres worldwide, according to a recent report.

Strangely, this is the first time that Google has released specific details about its total data centre electricity use. According to Jon Koomey, the report's author and a consulting professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Stanford University, Google "gave me an upper bound, not an exact number, but something is better than nothing".

Even better for Google, only 0.01 per cent of global electricity consumption is attributable to it, despite the fact that the internet search and advertising firm is a heavy user of computer servers.

The report says that this result is in part a function of the higher infrastructure efficiency of Google's facilities compared to in-house data centres, which is consistent with the efficiencies of other cloud computing installations. However it also "reflects lower electricity use per server for Google's highly optimised servers," the report said.

Overall, Koomey's data finds that early estimates of data centre power consumption were overstated, and the use of more efficient technology and the global economic downturn have had a significant combined effect.

Power consumption from global data centres doubled in the first five years of the new millennium, and was forecast to double again by 2010.

However, consumption rose by only 56 per cent, representing 1.1 to 1.5 per cent of global electricity consumption, and power use in the US rose just 36 per cent. Google has shown itself to have been blameless for excessive energy use in its data centres, at least in this report. µ