Google Defends Its Carbon Footprint

Many media outlets have the habit as of late of attaching carbon footprint figures to most human activities, both private and commercial. It's a tricky prospect, because the numbers can be crunched in a variety of ways, seldom leave out the media outlet's biases and – once published – are hard to correct in readers' minds.

Google (News - Alert) is the latest subject in the carbon footprint spotlight, and the search giant is reportedly upset at being represented by British newspaper The Sunday Times, which recently published questionable data on the company – that each search conducted by a user uses the same amount of energy as boiling a kettle – that Google is eager to refute. (Google later refuted this “tea kettle” accusation and the London Times ultimately accepted that each Google search produces about 35 times less energy than the paper had contended...a black eye for a reputable newspaper.)

By most multinational company standards, Google is one of the “good guys.” The company follows green policies on many of its data centers (reducing cooling, maximizing rack space, using high-efficiency equipment) in an effort to reduce the footprint of its data centers. It has a sustainability arm that encourages development of, and investment in, green products, processes and solutions.

To try and be upfront about its energy use, Google this week revealed its energy use as a company: 2.3 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity last year, which would power about 207,000 U.S. This makes the company a big user of energy, though not up into the category of a major oil company, for example, or a car company, which would use twice that energy, according to the Associated Press (News - Alert).

Rick Needham, director of green business operations at Google said in an interview that Google will continue to release this data periodically so the company's progress can be tracked by the public. “It holds our own feet to the fire,” he said.

Google says that to reduce its carbon footprint, it will be buying more renewable power, investing in renewable energy projects to help make it more available, making its data centers more efficient and paying for projects that remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, known as carbon offsets. The company also purchases over 25 percent of its energy from renewable sources.

In addition, the company points out that what its services are replacing would be dirtier, and it enables greener alternatives. While data centers may use lots of power, running a search uses less energy than getting in the car and going to the library, or to the town hall for a form, or to AA for a map. While it takes a lot of servers to store a company's entire cloud-CRM solution and data, it would take a lot more to run the CRM solution on a hodgepodge of individual servers and PCs (many of which may be old and inefficient) patched together at a company's business facility.

Google also points out that an e-mail system run on in-house servers consumes about 75 times more power than Google's Gmail service.

“I am greener than thou” finger pointing, popular in certain media circles nowadays, may uncover some truths, but it also uncovers some fuzzy morasses of misinformation that helps distract the public from larger pictures.

And one wonders when the Sunday Times will release information on its own carbon footprint.

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