Google Details and Defends Its Use of Electricity

theodp writes "On Thursday, Google finally provided information on its energy usage, revealing that it continuously uses enough electricity to power 200,000 homes. Still, the search giant contends that by using more power than Salt Lake City, Google actually makes the world a greener place. Google says people should consider things like the amount of gasoline saved when someone conducts a Google search rather than, say, driving to the library. As Police Chief Martin Brody might say, 'Google's going to need a bigger windmill!'"

What is different about Google is....

[WindBourne]

that they are investing into clean energy. Other companies run around screaming that they want coal, while Google says AE. Personally, I wish that Google would make use of some of that money to help create demand for geo-thermal energy, rather than simply investing in it. Honestly, if they insisted on buying energy directly from some geo-thermal locations, they could still manage to keep their costs low, while creating enough demand to stimulate it.

Re:OMFG Give me a break

[Attila Dimedici]

The reason that Google needs to defend its use of electricity is because Page and Brin are huge proponents of the need to take drastic action to deal with man caused global warming. When you are a big supporter of those running around telling everybody that the government needs to limit how much energy people can use (limiting how much fossil fuels people can use is the same as limiting how much energy they can use, as we do not have the means, at this time, to replace all of the energy we get from fossil fuels with energy from other sources), then people are going to look closely at how much energy you use.
The issue is not how much energy Google uses. The issue is whether or not Page and Brin are hypocrites. The answer is that they are hypocrites. They preach about Global Warming, yet flew off to the south pacific to view an eclipse.

Re:More importantly...

[confused one]

Google chose the site for one of it's data centers to take advantage of a hydro power plant that had formerly supplied an aluminum foundry.

Re:OMFG Give me a break

[RobinEggs]

Just because someone is a hypocrite doesn't mean what they're *saying* isn't valid; it means that what they're *doing* isn't valid.

If you believe someone gives good advice, then calling them a hypocrite isn't a free pass to spend more time criticizing their following of said advice than you do following it yourself.

I honestly don't care how much energy Sergey and Larry use: we'd get a thousand times farther if we reduced the energy footprint of the average American by a tenth of a percent than we will bitching at Google founders until they implement every green technology known to man. Just accept that they're flawed, self-righteous, and hypocritical and move on.

Re:it shouldn't be about how much they use

[swillden]

I'm not an electrical engineer. Why is using DC more efficient than AC? I'm assuming it arrives in the building as AC.

Computers use DC, not AC.

This means that at some point you have to do the conversion. The question is whether it's more efficient to do it in a small converter in each machine (traditional power supply unit), or to do it in a big converter that then feeds many boxes. The question isn't trivial because even though the big converter is unquestionably more efficient, you then have to deliver the DC power to the machines, and DC transmission is less efficient than AC transmission, meaning you either lose more energy to resistance or have to use bigger wires. Another common wrinkle is to convert AC to 48-volt DC then put small step-down transformers in each server or perhaps on each rack. This is because transmission of higher voltages is more efficient.

Bottom line is that there are a lot of tradeoffs and it's really not obvious what the best way to do it is, and Google's put a lot of skull sweat and experimentation into figuring out what's most efficient, and has (I think) published it.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but don't know anything about how power is managed in Google data centers, and haven't even read what Google has published to the world on the topic. Oh, and I am not an electrical engineer either.)

Re:it shouldn't be about how much they use

[tangent]

Computers run on DC. The big power supply unit in your PC is an AC-DC converter.

The speculation is that Google is doing a couple of different things in regards to power.

First, they are probably doing the AC to DC conversion at the building's power inlet, and distributing DC to the racks so that each piece of equipment doesn't have to have its own power supply. One big power supply is generally more efficient than lots of small power supplies, not just in conversion efficiency but also in hard equipment costs.

Second, Google has probably optimized their hardware to reduce the number of DC voltages they need. Your PC's power supply has to put out +/-12 Vdc, +/-5 Vdc, and +3.3 Vdc. Further, down on the motherboard, and sometimes on the peripherals, there are additional down-conversions to produce other needed voltages, such as ~1.2 Vdc for your CPU chip. Again, each conversion causes an efficiency loss, and they stack up. Some of these rails are all but unused in modern PCs — particularly the negative ones — but because of standardization, they have to be there anyway. Even sitting idle, these underutilized power rails waste energy. Overall, your computer probably consumes about 20% more AC power than it delivers in DC power to the parts in your PC.

You cannot do these things in your house today because 1) neither Newegg nor your local power company sells whole-house AC-DC converters; 2) even if they did, your house doesn't have separate DC power wiring to distribute it to the rooms; and 3) even if you put that in, there are no standard connectors to use for it. There's been hope for years that all of this would eventually be sorted out; the solution is obvious, it's just the logistics that's hard. I think that over time, we'll start seeing USB connectors with +5 Vdc appearing in houses, but it'll be a process of decades to make any real progress here. Google doesn't have to wait for all that.