Google recently disclosed that it continuously uses enough electricity to power 200,000 homes. Google’s data centers around the world continuously draw almost 260 million watts — about a quarter of the output of a nuclear power plant.
While the electricity figures may seem large, the company claims that the world is a greener place because people use less energy as a result of the billions of operations carried out in Google data centers. Google says people should consider things like the amount of gasoline saved when someone conducts a Google search as opposed to just driving around to find something.
Google says that people conduct over a billion searches a day and numerous other downloads and queries. But when it calculates that average energy consumption on the level of a typical user the amount is only about 180 watt-hours a month. The overall electricity figure includes all Google operations worldwide, like the energy required to run its campuses and office parks. Data centers, however, account for most of it.
