Energy eaten away by Websites

Websites that spend most energy

At the thought of energy consumption usually our first association is of industrial plants and


heavy machinery. But many people will be surprised by the information of how much 


energy and internet services we use every day.


Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and many others are the biggest consumers of energy 


on the Internet. It is estimated that only in the United States technology needed to 


maintain the Web site annually spends 100 billion kWh of energy, which is 1.5 percent of 


total energy consumption in the United States.


Judging by the last results, the largest consumers of the servers site are Facebook and 


Google. Behind them is Microsoft and then Yahoo, eBay and AOL. Peer1 Hosting company 


conducted a survey and published a detailed info that contains information on energy 


consumption of the world's most visited site.

Browsing and energy consumption

A recent study conducted in the area of browsing has shown that web technologies impact the consumption of energy in the client side. The Flash rotating ads are considered to be the most power consuming elements in the website.
When users browse different websites through search engines, a major power drain occurs. This was the main reason behind the measurement of the energy consumption when visiting many popular websites.

Researchers used various tools including Windows Task manager and other applications for measurement of the amperage for tests. The study concentrated more on the use of Flash in websites. It was not clear whether it is the technology of Flash or the way it is implemented in the website that makes this high energy consumption.

This study has revealed that it is still possible to surf the internet in the greenest manner. This power consumption will in fact increase over time. When this study will throw light to green manner of internet browsing, it is expected that this will be a beginning for the most advanced testing in this area. Websites might come to a place wherein they will start using less power consuming items in their web pages, thereby helping users and search engines.

Google reveals that it chomped over 2 billion kilowatt hours of energy in 2010, and plans to source 35 percent of its energy use from clean power next year.

Google's(NASDAQ:GOOG) search, Gmail, YouTube, Google+ and other Web services use less energy per user than a light left on for 3 hours, according to the search engine provider, which on Sept. 8 provided for the first time detailed statistics on its energy use.

The move, accompanied by a new Google green website, is designed to provide more transparency around not only Google's power consumption, but the energy savings associated with its clean energy efforts. 

Google says it consumed over 2 million MWh worth of electricity in 2010, or to put that in kilowatt-hours, 2 billion kWh. Researcher Jonathan Koomey uncovered a similar number last month, and reported that Google’s combined servers, storage, communications, and infrastructure had consumed 1.9 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2010. For comparison’s sake, an average American household in 2009 consumed 10,896 kWh of electricity, and the entire U.S. consumed close to 4,000 billion kWh worth of electricity in 2007. 

Google has invested some $800 million in solar and wind power sources that will create 1.7 gigawatts of renewable energy, which could power more than 350,000 homes.

Google also revealed that the energy used to support its Web services, which run in the cloud and are provisioned to users from data centers all over the world, generated 1.46 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, which could have been much greater.

"Without efficiency measures in our data centers our footprint would have been about twice as big. By purchasing and generating renewable energy, as well as buying high-quality carbon offsets, we bring our carbon impact to zero," the company explained on its green website.

Calculating energy consumption can be a dolorous task, but Google tried to make it fun. For example, the company said it takes more energy to send a message in a bottle than it does to use Gmail for a year, provided one counts the energy used to make the bottle and the wine consumed.

What about search, which uses only 0.0004 kWh of energy to retrieve the average search query? The energy required to do 100 Google.com searches is equivalent to 1 hour's use of a 30-watt laptop, 28 minutes of a 60-watt bulb burning or producing 1.5 tablespoons of orange juice.

Or try this one: Google's servers required to play 1 minute of YouTube consume about 0.0002 kWh of energy. To give folks an idea of what that means on a more practical level, it takes about 8 seconds for the human body to burn off that same amount.

An here's another one: "You'd have to watch YouTube for three straight days for our servers to consume the amount of energy required to manufacture, package and ship a single DVD," explained David Jacobowitz, program manager for green engineering and operation.

How does Google keep a relatively low energy consumption profile and carbon footprint? The company has been intensely focused on building the most efficient data centers in the world. For example, a new data center in Hamina, Finland, uses a unique seawater cooling system that consumes little electricity. At the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif., the company has a massive solar panel installation.

Google’s new transparency about its electricity consumption and carbon footprint is part of a new trend of data center operators sharing energy efficiency tools and methodologies. Facebook launched its open compute program earlier this year, revealing its energy-efficient server and data center designs. Google has also been willing to share its green data center best practices and has held annual summits on green data centers, but the electricity number took longer in coming. But as Rick Needham, Google’s green business operations manager, told me in an interview, opening up this type of data is proving to be a real benefit for the greater good of the industry.

Google says through a combination of buying clean power directly and the clean power sources of the utilities it buys power from, Google plans to source 35 percent of its electricity use from clean power by 2012. That’s up from 30 percent clean power in 2011, and 25 percent in 2010. Greenpeace estimated a similar figure in its report earlier this year — that Google had a clean power index of 36.4 percent. In addition to its growing clean power footprint, Google says the amount of clean power it has bought directly has jumped significantly over the past few years.

On top of Google’s clean power goals, the company has said it is carbon neutral since 2007, and it buys offsets to negate the remaining carbon emissions from the other 65 percent of the fossil fuel-based power it consumes. Buying offsets is essentially like providing funds for projects — like building a wind farm — that leads to a reduction of global carbon emissions. While these types of offsets are sometimes controversial, Google says it purchases offsets that are of the highest quality.