At the heart of the Internet search giant is its humongous energy consumptions. Make no mistake, every web pages indexed, ranked and sorted requires computing power. Factor in the upcoming cloud computing data centers, could this be the new "Big Autos" T-models-equivalent of the 21st century? Deja Vu.
You can't get something for nothing. You can't defy the Laws of Physics. Extracting information from the web requires energy. Maybe its high time that we have a web efficiency energy rating of some sort?
For Google to enter into searching, indexing and storing of all imaginable digitized media,
the energy consumption can only go up and not down. More social sites and probably more specialized sites will spring up to take advantage and harvest newly available info: explosion in "infomation plantations".
That in turn means more energy consumptions. More oils and coals. And more CO2.
This raises the issue of Cloud Computing's carbon footprint. ElasticVapor has an article on this that sums it up succintly:
"Then there is the question of consumption, we now have the ability to run our applications on thousands of servers, but previously this wasn't even possible. To say it another way, we can potentially use several years worth of energy in literary a few hours, where previously this wasn't even an option. So in direct contrast, hypothetically we're using more resources, not less. On the flip side, if we bought those thousand servers and had them running (under utilized) the power usage would be significantly higher. But then again, buying those servers would have been out reach for most, so it's not a fair comparison. There we are -- back, at where we started. You may use 80% less energy per unit, but have 1000% more capacity which at the end of the day means you're using more, not less energy."
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