Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is a leader when it comes to being a "green" kind of company. It shuttles employees from the Bay Area to its Mountain View headquarters in biodiesel vans, has what is considered the be the largest solar array in corporate America and uses alternative energy in its operations, unlike most of the business world.But what about all the actual electricity the company consumes? It has huge data centers all over the world that power its search and web product network, and these campuses consume gobs of electricity off the global grid. So, does Google purchase electricity for these data centers from electric cooperatives that generate all that juice with standard coal-fired electricity generation plants? Hard to tell, because the company won't say.
Sure, electric consumption is a competitive secret of sorts, even though RechargeIT.org -- under Google's philanthropic arm Google.org -- is focused on hybrid and alternative transportation methodologies. So, why is Google so mum when it comes to the amount of electricity it consumes on a global basis?
Is the company afraid someone will reverse engineer those power figures and figure out just how many servers and data centers the company has? Is that competitive advantage to anyone? Perhaps, perhaps not. Google, though, probably does not want the world to know of the massive consumption of electricity that powers the company's services while it breathes, eats and lives the word "green" on the other side of the table.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
12-28-2007 @ 2:30PM
TX CHL Instructor said...
I would venture to guess that Google has the largest collection of data centers in the world, which would lead one to conclude that they have to use more electricity than any other data center company in the world. They are vigorously pursuing ways to reduce the cost of that consumption (including using as little as possible). As long as the price of energy accurately reflects all of the real costs of production, those efforts could certainly be considered 'green' in the truest sense. So what's your beef?
12-31-2007 @ 1:26PM
Cash said...
Get Green here:
www.PowerGoneWild.com