Google Uses 260 Million Watts of Power
Google released what was once among its most closely guarded secrets on Thursday: how much electricity its enormous computing facilities consume. The company said that its data centers continuously drew almost 260 million watts about a quarter of the output of a nuclear power plant to run Google searches, YouTube views, Gmail messaging and display ads on all those services around the world.
Google says that people conduct over a billion searches a day and numerous other downloads and queries, and it calculates that the average energy consumption for a typical user is small, about 180 watt-hours a month, or the equivalent of running a 60-watt light bulb for three hours. The overall electricity figure includes all Google operations worldwide, including the energy required to run its campuses and office parks, he added. Google also released an estimate that an average search uses 0.3 watt-hours of electricity, a figure that may be difficult for many people to understand intuitively. But when multiplied by Googles estimate of more than a billion searches a day, the figure yields a somewhat surprising result: approximately 12.5 million watts of Googles 260-million-watt total can be accounted for by searches, the companys bread-and-butter service.
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