Althouse: "Google are very efficient but their primary concern is to make searches fast and that means they have a lot of extra capacity that burns energy."

January 11, 2009

Tibore said...: "Physicist Alex Wissner-Gross says that performing two Google searches uses up as much energy as boiling the kettle for a cup of tea..."

Fine. Boil one less cup of tea and be done with it. But don't write an article complaining about the relatively large power consumption of a modern data center. All that does is add to the nattering in society on this topic.

Google's is not the only datacenter in existence. Far from it. And the power is being applied to a given DC is applied regardless of whether you're conducting your search at the moment or not.

Modern computing is simply requiring more power as it advances. I'm not insensitive to the issues of energy generation and anthropomorphic climate change, but there's a problem when the urge to green an area of society hinders advancement. This is one of those points. Improve efficiencies for CPUs (already in continuous research), improve efficiencies for storage mechanisms (i.e. arrays of hard drives; also already being continuously researched), find ways to reduce the cooling required (ibid). Society's already doing that in order to reduce impact on the environment. But don't presume that writing an article making people think "Oh, if I do two less Google searches today, I'll have helped the environment" will make any real difference. It's articles like this that contribute to stupid penny-wise-but-pound-foolish notion that deprivation is the only solution for energy conservation.; 1/12/09, 12:11 PM

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