12 September 2011 | Claire Farrell
Carbon, Energy, ICT, North America

 

The Googleplex: Google headquarters at Silicon Valley, covered in solar panels.

For the first time Google has announced its carbon footprint. The internet super-power emits 1.5m tonnes of carbon annually, and claimed that without its energy efficient measures, emissions would have doubled.

Google’s footprint matches the UN operational’s energy usage, and is just above the emission level of the country Laos in south-east Asia, as revealed by the company’s announcement last Thursday.

Google’s self-imposed accountability on its carbon activity was hosted on its Google Green website, and is seen as a significant step toward greener business.

“We’ve seen lots of leadership from Google on sustainability but not in terms of transparency. It’s good to see them finally put their footprint data on the table, which hopefully should start a more robust debate on the energy use of online services. We need to see others doing the same.” Gary Cook, senior IT policy analyst for Greenpeace International told the Guardian.

Google’s openness may be encouraging but the internet continues to provide challenges to greener business and living. The carbon footprint of the internet each year is estimated to be hundreds of millions of tonnes. Subsequently, despite green efforts, Google’s carbon footprint has continued to grow year on year.

This rise in Google’s emissions reflects an ever growing number of users and society’s increasing reliance on online services, the company told the Guardian. Google declined to reveal how much its energy use has risen since the previous year, but said that the figures would be released soon via the Carbon Disclosure Project.

The steps Google has taken to curb its environmental damage are not common amongst multi-national companies. The company uses cloud-based servers for many of its services, including Gmail. Traditional servers, which are often energy inefficient, can create up to 80 times more emissions. Consequently, data centres owned by Google consume 50% less energy than the industry average, the company claims.

Over US$780 million worth of investments in renewable energy generation and cleaner technologies is largely responsible for Google’s environmental advantage over other firms. Google generates its own electricity from solar energy at its Silicon Valley campus, uses cleaner cooling technology and has a subsidiary firm, Google Energy, which has federal approval to buy and sell wholesale power. Google Energy also owns a major stake in the Atlantic Wind Connection, a planned offshore wind farm.

Yet not all Google’s philanthropy has to gone to plan. PowerMeter, a free energy monitoring tool designed to help users view their home’s energy consumption online from anywhere in the world, is being taken out of use as the scheme “did not scale as quickly as we had hoped,” Google claim on the PowerMeter website.

Google even came under fire when in 2009 a story was published claiming that each Google search carried out on the website had a shocking carbon footprint of 7g of CO2, though Google claimed that figure included factors it was not responsible for, such as each user’s computer power. The company claimed the actual footprint of a search was 0.2g, and used this figure for the carbon footprint report released last week.

As the power consumed by an ever increasing number of internet users, and the places and ways in which the internet is accessed continues to grow rapidly, internet companies must find innovative technologies, like cloud-based servers, to mitigate the impact on the environment, and invest in renewable energy to offset the effects of higher internet usage. However, perhaps most importantly, any companies that follow Google’s lead, and adopt increased transparency, will help to increase pressure to be energy efficient.
 

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