Friday 9 September 2011

Google discloses its carbon footprint for the first time

Google has today published its energy usage figures, revealing that its CO2 footprint – at almost 1.5m tonnes per year – is all down to the cloud: doing more with less.
The move comes after a report released earlier this year from Greenpeace How Dirty is Your Data report looked at global cloud companies' energy footprint, analysing what it called IT's biggest disruption - cloud.

At the time, Apple topped the league in the Greenpeace report for its reliance on coal power (54.5pc), closely followed by Facebook at 53.2pc and IBM at 51.6pc. Next in line was HP at 49.4pc, followed by Twitter at 42.5pc, Google at 34.7pc, Microsoft at 34.1pc, Amazon at 28.5pc and Yahoo! at 18.3pc.

Google, however, announced today that in providing everything from Google+ to Gmail, YouTube its servers use less energy per user than a light left on for three hours.

"And, because we've been a carbon-neutral company since 2007, even that small amount of energy is offset completely, so the carbon footprint of your life on Google is zero," said Urs Hoelzle, senior vice-president, Technical Infrastructure on the Google Green site.

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